A board of trustees, or of directors or commissioners, is
the representative of the community in its control of the
library and in the formal service rendered by the community
to the library. The relationship was familiar in other
public institutions at the time that public libraries began
to be established, and its duties, responsibilities and
limitations in this instance were regarded as being the same
as in others. They were therefore not widely discussed, and
the work of library trusteeship is still too little
systematized.
The Trustees' Section of the A.L.A., founded in order that
Library trustees might gather yearly to discuss their
peculiar problems, has always been scantily attended. The
Indiana Trustees Association is the only prosperous body of
the kind in the United States, but its success might well
prove suggestive to library trustees in other states. The
three following papers were all read at a single library
conference in 1890, which may show that there was then some
degree of awakening to the necessity for discussing this
phase of library administration.