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THE h'A.TiOA!ALE OF FREE PUBLIC LIBRARIES. 43
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polis, and it is to be hoped that we shall soon hear of some
success.
In addition to their principal work of popularising the best
literature of the country, public libraries have other functions
to perform of no slight importance. The reference departments
will naturally become, in the progress of time, the
depositories of collections of local literature and records which
would otherwise not improbably perish. Tbe public librarian
will consider it part of his duty to collect the ephemeral
publications of the local press. Local pamphlets, municipal
reports, companies' reports, fly-sheets of various kinds, local
newspapers, minor magazines, election squibs; in fact, all the
documents which register the life of the town and country,
should be sedulously brought together, filecl, and bound after
due arrangement. It ia sometimes supposed that the British
Museum collects everything which issues from the press, but
this applies at the best only to publications having copyright.
Mr. W. E. A. Axon has urged that the Museum should not
only collect a11 literature, but issue periodical indexes of all
that is printed. I hardly see how it is possible for the Museum
to cope with the ever-increasing mas6 of printed documents.
Already the newspaper collections are increasing so much in
bulk that it is difficult to find space for them. 1 know, as it
positive fact, that there are immense numbers of statistical
reports, police reports, country finance reports, and documents
of all kinds, public, private, or semi-private, which seldom do
and hardly can find their way to the Museum, or to any great
metropolitan library; but where the Museum necessarily fails,
the local library can easily succeed, so as to become in time
the depository of invaluable materials for local history and
statistical inquiry.
A good deal is already being done in this direction, a
explained by Mr. W. H. K. Wright, of the Plymouth Free
Library, in the Report of the first annual meeting of the
Library Association (pp. 44-50). At Liverpool Mr. Cowell is
collecting, arranging, and cataloguing a large number of
books, plans, maps, and drawings of local interest. At Rochdale
and Bristol like efforta are being made. In the Leicesttrr