readers' tickets sent in, 250 were found to have accurate titles, and press-marks added, 430 were without press-marks, but contained accurate titles and dates of the books required, 20 had wrong or incomplete press-marks, 300 contained approximate descriptions merely. Thus seventy-five per cent, of the demands needed completion or correction by the staff before they could be attended to.
In the same report are quoted some of the errors in authors' names, as given by readers : Bukler (Butler), Cousin de Plancy (Collin de Plancy), Blant (Le Blant), J. Renan (Ernest Renan), Straus (Schwab). If the searcher after knowledge who wrote these forms had been obliged to look them up in a catalogue, the more intelligent, failing to find them, would have corrected their own errors, the rest could have had them corrected on appeal to the staff in charge of the Reading-room.
We have been assured by the officials at the Bibliotheque that the French public would much resent having to look everything up in catalogues.[1] Their attitude is very much that of Carlyle, who, in giving his evidence before the British Museum Commission of 1849, objected to having this duty put upon him, and backed himself up by saying that when he went to a haberdasher's to buy a yard of green ribbon he did not expect to be asked "which drawer it was kept in!"
- ↑ With the publication of the printed catalogue of the Bibliotheque Nationale, of which the first volume has just appeared (August 1897), we presume the work of searching will be more and more shifted from staff to readers.
