reforms were necessary,
and that is the burden of the first letter. Dury's cardinal principle is
that libraries should be _useful_ to people: "It is true that a fair
Librarie, is ... an ornament and credit to the place where it is [the
'jewel box' concept]; ... yet in effect it is no more then a dead Bodie
as now it is constituted, in comparison of what it might bee, if it were
animated with a publick Spirit to keep and use it, and _ordered as it
might bee for publick service_" (p. 17, my emphasis). The public that
Dury refers to is an academic faculty and not the general public. To
insure fullest use he goes on to advocate the necessity of a _printed_
catalogue with yearly manuscript supplements to be issued as a
cumulative printed supplement every three years. He does not reach the
point of proposing a call-number system but stresses the importance of
shelf-location guides in the catalogue. He believes in aggressive
acquisition policies and the necessity of good faculty-librarian
relations, with the former advising the latter of the important books in
their fields of specialization. He urges what might now be called
"interlibrary loan" and other forms of sharing. To keep the librarian on
the straight and narrow, apparently a recurrent problem in Dury's day,
he recommends an annual meeting of a faculty board of governors where
the librarian will give his annual report and put on an exhibition of
the books he has acquired. To allay the temptation to make a little
money on the side by "trading" (Dury's obsessive term) in the library's
books for his personal profit, the librarian is to receive
administrative support for his various expenses during the year and, as
a scholar working with other scholars within his university instead of
as a mere factotum, the librarian is to receive an adequate salary
(perhaps the only one of Dury's reforms that must wait until the
millennium).

The question remains to what extent Dury's duties as the deputy
librarian of the King's Library allowed him to implement the reforms he
advocated on paper. The probable answer is, not very much. The
librarian's duties and responsibilities described by Dury are those of
an academic, university librarian, interacting with the faculty and
participating fully in the intellectual life of a scholarly community.
The role of the librarian of the King's Library would have been that of
keeper of a static and isolated collection, and Dury is particularly
crit