Abstract
A WELL-ATTENDED conference on “The Works Library”, organised at Sheffield on March 27 by the Northern Branch of the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux, was designed to help the budding works librarian to appreciate the scope of his work and the resources at his disposal. The chairman of the Conference, Mr. W. H. Higgin-botham, chairman of Messrs. Edgar Allen and Co., Ltd., at the opening session, when the Association was welcomed by the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, emphasized the extent and diversity of knowledge required in industry and the importance of ensuring at all levels a sufficiency of knowledge and specialized information for the successful operation of an industrial or business undertaking, and of providing for its co-ordination and combination into an effective working tool. This is the essential task of the Association, and in the two papers presented at the morning session, “Pages from the Diary of a Steel Works Librarian” and “A Special Library in the Steel Industry”, Mr. G. H. Davison and Miss A. R. Osborne gave some account of the building up of a library and information service for the United Steel Companies, Ltd., and for Messrs. Thomas Firth and John Brown, Ltd. Mr. Davison's paper in particular covered a wide range of problems in the organisation and running of a firm's library ; Miss Osborne's paper was illustrated by lantern slides, and those attending the Conference had a further opportunity of seeing the actual functioning of the information service on the following morning when parties visited the Brown-Firth Research Laboratories. Other delegates availed themselves of the invitation of Messrs. Edgar Allen & Co., Ltd., to visit their works and laboratories. At the afternoon session Mr. E. N. Simons contributed a stimulating paper on “The Works Library of To-morrow”, in which he suggested a number of probable trends in works library service during the next few decades. In the concluding paper, Mr. R. Brightman discussed “Reference Books for the Works Library”, dealing with the needs of a library concerned with production rather than with research, and submitting a series of lists designed to help the novitiate in charge of such a library in the selection of his or her own desk tools, general reference books, technical reference books and single-volume textbooks of the 'refresher' type ; in general he only included one-volume reference works.
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Library Service in Industry. Nature 159, 771 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159771b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159771b0