Project Gutenberg 2025-07-28 Public domain in the USA. 275 Baker, Ernest A. (Ernest Albert) 1869 1941 Baker, Ernest Albert 22020655 The public library $aLondon :$bDaniel O'Connor, $c1922. I. Historical sketch -- II. What is a library service? -- III. Library extension -- IV. Rural libraries -- V. A national library service -- VI. Training in librarianship. Carla Foust, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) "The public library" by Ernest A. Baker is a treatise on library history, policy, and practice written in the early 20th century. It examines the rise and role of public libraries in Britain, urging their integration with adult education and their coordination into a national system. Drawing on history and current practice, it defines what a complete public library service should include—from lending and reference work to children’s, rural, and technical services—and how governance and funding must adapt. The opening of the book sets a reformist tone: after noting that recent legislation averted financial collapse but left bigger aims unmet, it calls for urban and rural libraries to be coordinated into an economic, national service and criticizes how little sociologists have valued libraries. It then sketches the movement from post-Waterloo self-help and Mechanics’ Institutes through Ewart’s permissive Acts, highlighting Edward Edwards’s advocacy, the early focus on museums, debates over taxation and “dangerous” knowledge, uneven municipal adoption, philanthropy (notably Carnegie), and the crippling penny-rate limit. The narrative shows how consolidating Acts and Scottish provisions improved matters but left libraries isolated from schools and other educational agencies until the Adult Education Committee pressed for change; a later Act removed the rate cap and enabled county-based rural systems, yet deeper structural reforms were deferred. Turning to practice, the book contrasts progressive with perfunctory services, then defines the lending library’s purpose, the shift to open access, the value of branches over mere delivery points, and liberal borrowing to encourage serious study amid chronic shortages of books. It outlines the reference library’s tools and functions, notes local special collections, and treats newspapers and periodicals as “current history,” best curated alongside ready-reference works to foster informed citizenship. It advocates study rooms, small class spaces, and, crucially, robust children’s departments modeled on the best American examples, illustrated by the Croydon junior library’s lectures, storytelling, classification training, and close work with schools. The section closes by introducing the need for commercial and industrial library services, signaling a detailed treatment to follow. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/publiclibrary00bakerich/page/n7/mode/2up 20221114063851baker 1922 GB Reading ease score: 43.3 (College-level). Difficult to read. en Public libraries -- Great Britain Library extension -- Great Britain Z Text Category: History - British Category: Teaching & Education 513327 2025-09-30T08:19:45.782406 text/html 467609 2025-07-28T15:00:55 text/html 2509637 2025-09-30T08:19:54.169370 application/epub+zip 2511757 2025-09-30T08:19:47.645375 application/epub+zip 282386 2025-09-30T08:19:46.620442 application/epub+zip 2765946 2025-09-30T08:19:58.568324 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 2731433 2025-09-30T08:19:53.266424 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 402089 2025-09-30T08:19:44.586476 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 382202 2025-07-28T15:00:55 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 17510 2025-09-30T08:19:58.918359 application/rdf+xml 11663 2025-09-30T08:19:46.856451 image/jpeg 1912 2025-09-30T08:19:46.736378 image/jpeg 2487738 2025-09-30T08:19:45.862395 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia