1931 - Annual Convention

              A L B E R T A W O M E N ' S I N S T I T U T ES
It must be noted that the government grant does not cover money ex­pended
on maintenance or salaries, but is concerned only v/ ith monjy spent
on books, so that if it is possible in the beginning to have voluntary service
in the care of the books, that is a very direct gain, and I must say that I
t h i n k highly enough of the various women's organizations in the province to
believe that they will see in such service a noble opportunity tor * aluable
community work.
One other thing may be said. That is that a l i b r a r y may look for a
certain number of donations of books, especially when it is starting up, and
a very strong drive should be made for donations in k i n d . Here a w a r n i n g has
to be given, that a very h i g h percentage of the books donated may have no
very great value for the. l i b r a r y , and - many of them should be eliminated quietly
as the days go on, but it gives people a good feeling to donate books, and
that should be encouraged. In the case of Cardston, the Rotary Club is
undertaking to put in a stock of boys' books, and the Board of Trade is
p u t t i n g in books on economics, and I t h i n k that that kind of thing could be
very easily encouraged, especially i n the i n i t i a l year of a l i b r a r y ' s operation.
As funds are likely to be quite short in the first year or two of the new
effort, I have been t h i n k i n g that I would work a l i t t l e more on the sympathy
of the M i n i s t e r of Education, and ask h im whether donations of books would
be considered as equivalent to cash donations, provided that the books were
reasonably valued, and I think if he could find it in his heart to make this
concession, say for the first year of a library's existence, it would help a
great many of the smaller efforts away to a flying start.
There are a thousand other things that might be said about the kind of
books to get, the kind of journals to subscribe to; about what proportion of
the money available s h o u l d be spent on children's books, on fiction, on serious
books for grown up readers, and so on, but I w i l l have to leave that, and I
can do it with an easy conscience as the A l b e r t a L i b r a r y Association, whose
secretary is Mrs. C. E . Race, of the U n i v e r s i t y of A l b e r t a Library, w i l l be
more than delighted to enter into correspondence with any of you when the
proper time comes about these points. I would like to say, also, that there
is not a l i b r a r i a n in any l i b r a r y of the province who w i l l not be more than
delighted to help out any effort by all means possible.
No matter how many libraries we establish, there w i l l always be, as I
have said earlier, need for access to a wider circle of books, so that a serious
reader w i l l always be b o r r o w i n g from far away libraries, I hope. The L i b r a ry
A s s o c i a t i o n is t a k i n g up the question of postal rates on books, and we hope
before very long to have some concession made on this point, as the present
postal charges of double carriage on a book is : i very serious handicap to
r u r a l readers. What I personally hope is that the registered libraries w i ll
have the right of m a i l i n g books out free of postage to r u r a l points within the
a r e i served by it, the reader to pay return postage only. May I say in con­c
l u d i n g that there is one social ambition which I think moves all of us, and
that is the desire to see equalitj' of opportunity in all the good things of life
between people in cities and people in the remoter rural places, and this
l i b r a r y effort of which I have been speaking is one of the steps toward
a t t a i n i n g that ideal. We hope to live to see the day when any rural reader
who desires to see any good book whatsoever, w i l l have the chance of having
it brought to his hand at the smallest possible cost, and with the greatest
possible speed.
1 have refrained from speaking about the school libraries of the province,
w h i c h form a distinct and very pressing problem and have confined myself
rather to public l i b r a r y service in the ordinary sense of the word, but I trust