The Prescotian

At long last our hopes have been realised, and we have entered into our new home. Those of us who have striven and aspired, from the days when the library was a few musty secondhand novels housed in a cupboard in a dark corner of the corridor and the " system " consisted of an exercise book, can look with satisfaction on our handiwork, and take pride in the present orderly shelves and variety of reading matter arranged there. But we must not relax our efforts. There still remains a great work to be done in providing more and still more facilities, and persuading the County Council that we deserve an even greater grant for this work than ever before, in collecting books from interested well-wishers, and in making the library one of the central features of the school.

In this work you who read this report can help us. You can become regular customers ; you can help us to fill the shelves with gift books ; most of all, you can show by your interest that the library deserves to prosper.

Statistics are never very interesting, but we may be forgiven for quoting just a few. The library contains more than 2,000 books, which have been all catalogued and card-indexed according to the Dewey Decimal system, which is in regular use in public libraries. Since the opening of the new room we have made over 3,500 issues, which represents about 12 books per boy in the school and considerably more than that for active borrowers. We have spent over £100 in new books and have received gifts of more than 250 volumes.

Such progress could not have been made without the help of many workers. We should like to express the school's thanks to those who did so much work in labelling and cataloguing, and to the boy librarians who have given their time to make the library function so well.

Thanks to donors of books is expressed elsewhere in this magazine, but we wish to impress our readers with the idea that we shall have more empty shelves to fill in the near future.