The Project Gutenberg EBook of Government Documents in Small Libraries, by
Charles Wells Reeder

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Title: Government Documents in Small Libraries
Reprinted from Report of Board of Library Commissioners
of Ohio for the Year ending November 15, 1909.

Author: Charles Wells Reeder

Release Date: September 7, 2008 [EBook #26551]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Government Documents
in
Small Libraries

Government Documents
in
Small Libraries
BY
CHARLES WELLS REEDER

Reprinted from Report of Board of Library Commissioners of Ohio for the
year ending November 15, 1909.

The Springfield Publishing Company,
State Printers.
Springfield, Ohio:
1910.

Government Documents in Small Libraries

_By CHARLES WELLS REEDER,
Assistant Reference Librarian,
Ohio State University._

[Substance of an address before a meeting of librarians held under the
auspices of the Library Organizer of the Ohio Library Commission, Ohio
State University, October 8, 1909.]

The problem of government publications in the small libraries has been
discussed at much length by librarians, but it is still far from a
definite solution. In fact, there can be no general settlement of many
phases of this question, for each and every library must decide what
its own policy and attitude shall be toward this class of publications.

It is generally admitted that some libraries ought to have all the
publications that are made for distribution, and therefore a system of
depository libraries is maintained by the government. The libraries
which are not favored with this privilege are compelled to make a
selection from the great number of documents and there is the essence
of the problem for discussion here. The question of what to get
involves the selection of certain publications which will be useful to
present patrons of the library and the acquisition of those for which a
demand can be created