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SMAD. An Organ of Student Opinion. 1931. Volume 2. Number 1.

The Library

page 9

The Library.

You must forgive a librarian if his first word to freshers is about the library rules. The point is that there Are rules: it is a good plan to read them up before you begin to use the library. That is all I care to say. We have a good library, with a noble reading room, 25000 volumes of well-selected books and a sound working tradition. It is a place to be proud of, and I wish to invite your co-operation in trying to keep it so. (a) Now to make the best use of it you must first master the simple system of classification, and the basis of classification is this: one section for each professor. Each section has its own letter, and the sub-divisions of each section are indicated by members, e.g., CI for Greek Texts, C6 for Greek and Roman History. All the sciences are S. The whereabouts of these various sections you will find by consulting the shelf-plan on the table near the entrance. (b) To find a particular book you must go to the catalogue, in which every book is represented by a card and the cards are arranged in alphabetical orders according to the authors' names. At the top of the card you will find letters indicating the book's place in the library, e.g., Shakespeare's Hamlet will be indicated by E3 over (4) S—where E3 is the sub-division and S the place in the alphabetical series within that sub-division; (4) is merely the size of the book, (c) If you do not want a particular book, but want instead to know all the books in the library that deal with a certain Subject, you must look for the card which has that subject written where the author's name usually is found. If the subject you want is Greek History, look for 'Greece, Hist-of.' Remember that the whole collection of cards is a single alphabetical series: the second and third and moving letters count, e.g., Shakespeare comes before Shaw. Unfortunately our subject headings are meagre. We are at present at work upon a new and quite separate subject catalogue. (d) What our resources are you must find out for yourselves, except that I think I ought to indicate one or two sections of the library where books are kept which do not come within the ordinary academic course. A few modern plays and novels are kept in E3; a small collection of Continental literature (not French or German) in V3, book on Art in Ed4 and Biography in B. And of course you will all look up old volumes of The Spike in V2. (e) A list of new books is posted on the notice board outside the entrance at the end of each month.

One word of advice. The golden rule is: Not many but much. Browse among the multitude of books, dip into many, but really get to know a few and think and argue about them freely. "If I read as many books as my neighbours," said old John Locke, "I should be as ignorant as they are."

H.M.