CHAIRMAN’S PREFACE. 
The Reports contained in this volume again show a steady record 
of useful and progressive work in the fine range of buildings in 
William Brown Street, which, with their branches through the 
City, constitute the Municipal home of Literature, Science, and 
Art. 
Taking the Libraries alone, no one who visits the Reference 
Library, filled every day from morning till evening, with its 
hundreds of quiet, persistent readers, can fail to recognise that if 
that were the only field of the Committee’s activities their work 
would be of the utmost value to the community. Works of fiction, 
which are by some wrongly supposed to constitute the chief 
attraction in a Public Library, find no place there, and yet during 
_ the year there were issued to readers, in that one Library, 427,000 
: volumes, mostly in the sections of History, Topography, Politics, 
_ and Art. 
be: In all departments of the Committee’s work there was an increase 
in 1910, the most marked development being in the books for 
: children in the Lending Libraries. The issue of these in 1910 
exceeded that in 1909 by no fewer than 109,000 volumes. The 
policy of the Committee is to induce the children to use the Libraries 
while still at school, and to keep them as readers when they grow 
up. 
The only new Library opened during 1910 was that at the Rawdon 
Reading Room, the immediate success of which was remarkable, as 
the issues at once reached an average of nearly 3,000 volumes a 
week. 
The present year will have a much larger record of new Libraries 
and Reading Rooms completed. 
