Library Trends 13 (3) 1965: Regional Public Library Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
reported that prior to 1937 there had been only two multi-county libraries in the United States and four regional libraries in Canada.By 1944, fourteen more regional libraries (all in the southeastern United States) had been added to this meager list.Oliver Garceau, in his volume for the Public Library Inquiry3 pointed out that states had generally approached the creation of the larger unit by combining counties rather than by attempting to create "the special district..,for it had been found by students of government to contribute extensively to the chaos of American local government ., , He reported: "Most of the active library extension agencies can now point to two or three regional units within their borders . . . the great majority ...are two-county affair^."^Their scarcity at that time may help identify the few extension agencies which the author regarded as "active."Garceau stated that at the time of the Inquiry "some regions organized less than ten years ago are already eroding, . . .counties have been glad to be on their own again."4He took a generally dim view of this kind of regional library, and his label of the regional movement as "the bitter struggle to destroy or to swallow up village, city, and county li- brarie~"h as been a thorn in the flesh of many state agencies since its publication, and is not exact.Concerning this alleged condition of "erosion" and "bitter struggle," by 1963 only two of the twelve multi-county regional libraries in the United States ten years before the Public Library Inquiry had dissolved into single county libraries.The other ten had been reorganized and proliferated into twenty multi-county libraries, with the number of counties involved having grown from forty-four to seventy-three.And, more surprising still, there were at least 140 additional multi-county regional libraries with more than 400 counties in~olved.~The limiting "at least" has been used since it is highly likely that it has not been possible to identify all existing examples in all states, nor determine the status of all demonstrations.In all but nine states some form, or combination of forms, of regional libraries has been put into operation.Twenty-four states have one or more multi-county regional libraries.Four of these plus five others are employing the demonstration method for the establishment of new multi-county regions.In fourteen states there are more than forty branches of the state library extension agency, with two states having both multi-county libraries and state agency branches.In view of the recommendation in The Public Library Inquirye generally and of the doubts so well expressed by Garceau, the question
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".