TYPES OF LIBRARIES. Because of their number and importance, public libraries are always meant unless some other type is specified. In private and family libraries the shelf-list is the most important single record. as it erOnbine: in cheapest form both invoice book and inventory. and may easily have added to it the essential accession book facts. With better understand of their value. many private libraries have card indexes and accession books as well as shelf-lists.
Proprietary and club libraries are only larger family libraries. as they are open only to those elected to membership.
Subscription or circulating libraries are car ried on as a business and are usually open to all who pay the fees. Their records and methods are the simplest and cheapest, except for in stitutions like Muclie's and Smith's in England, and tile Booklovers with its Tabard Inn and other branches in this country.
National and Stale libraries have a distinct function in preserving for posterity everything printed which they can obtain. They are the central storehouses on which all local libraries in their field may draw when necessary. This de mands large provision for storage and 'facilities for sending books quickly and safely to students and libraries. They should have books, pain ph lets, manuscripts, and other material which because of rarity or little demand are seldom found in local collections. The smaller libraries
have learned that the first cost of a hook is seldom its chief expense. It must be catalogued, classified, shelved, cleaned, and inventoried yearly even if never used. Libraries limited in funds cannot afford to accept as gifts books seldom used. The average library is becoming one in a series of sieves. The traditional con ception of a library required it to keep all it could get. The immense growth in volume of books issued has enforeed new ideas. A scholar outgrows certain books which he has kept on his table, and relegates them to the shelves of his private library. Later he sifts out books seldom wanted and sends them to the public library, where they will serve the whole locality instead of one person. Club and subscription libraries make room by disposing freely of books no longer needed. Recently thoughtful observers realize that even public libraries, except a few great central storehouses, must in turn take their place in the series of sieves and abandon the plan of keeping everything, selecting up to their capacity what will lie most useful and sending the rest to State or national centres, to be destroyed if found to be duplicates too common to be worth keeping.