CHAIRMAN’S” PREFACE. 
With this volume the Library, Museum and Arts Committee 
may be said to have reached their Diamond Jubilee, for it forms 
the Sixtieth Annual Report of their work. The steady progress 
of that work, and the way in which, year by year, the departments 
under their charge have been made more and more useful to the 
community, appear in the interesting Historical Summary, prepared 
by the Chief Librarian, on pages 7 to 14 of his Report. 
It is a happy circumstance that the donors to whose generosity 
we owe the inception of the three branches which are served by the 
Committee’s Institutions in William Brown Street, the 13th Earl 
of Derby, Sir William Brown, and Sir Andrew Walker, are all 
to-day represented on the Committee by their descendants, the 
17th Earl of Derby, Mr. Ronald Stewart-Brown, and Colonel W. 
Hall Walker. In this fact there is security that in the development 
of those Institutions the original intentions of the benefactors are 
being duly respected. 
The work has grown beyond any anticipations which those 
benefactors could have formed. It was said years ago that a 
Library could be fairly representative of all branches of literature 
when it reached 10,000 carefully selected volumes. But that 
number of volumes are issued every day in our Libraries, while the 
Museums and Art Gallery are visited by nearly a million persons 
in the course of a year. 
One very satisfactory feature in the Library statistics is the 
greatly increased issues, nearly 84,000 volumes more than last year, 
to juvenile readers. There are now 19,500 children holding 
Reader’s Tickets in the Lending Libraries, and although a large 
proportion of the books they take out come under the heading of 
fiction, last year 414,000 volumes were in other departments, more 
than half of these being books of Travel, History, Biography and 
Fine Arts. 
