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FOREIGN COUNTRIES AND DANISH PUBLIC LIBRARIES 119
founding of several new libraries in town and country, but having, from
the beginning, started under conditions much too narrow, and having even
suggested a modest beginning, there came a time when everything seemed to
be at a stand-still. Had not Steenberg understood how to lend inspiration to a
small group of idealists who still kept the flag flying, it is doubtful what all
the foreign technic, which, too, on account of money difficulties was
con-tinually reduced, would have been able to create.
That the Danish library-service is of such high quality to-day is to a
great extent due to the fact that a man from the old scientific libraries, the
Royal Library’s Chief Librarian, H. O. Lange, in 1909 for the first time
drew up the plan for a Danish Library Organization and thought out a
system which must undoubtedly be regarded as national, namely the plan
of founding the so-called Central-Libraries, which have, also, become the
main support of the Danish Public-Libraries Service. Lange did not acquire
his idea from America, where anything in this way did not, at any rate at
that time, exist, but seems, in consequence of his great interest in English
libraries, to have had his thoughts directed towards England’s large,
solidly-working, municipal urban libraries, when in the above mentioned year he
suggested the founding of urban libraries (of those existing none were as
yet of importance) and making them into centres for a whole County’s
Library activities, Libraries that, with a stock of abt. 50,000 volumes, should
be in a position to satisfy every town-reader’s demands as far as the
mother-tongue was concerned, and at the same time to take upon itself the
furnishing of books to existing village-libraries in the surrounding country,
either directly or by assistance granted in book-form as well as in a
library-technical männer. This plan caused, undoubtedly, the renewal of
the Danish Public-Libraries and must in reality be regarded as something
quite different from the earlier sparse efforts of sending out travelling
libraries, from small and quite insufficiently provided town-libraries. From this
time it became clear to all that only large libraries with professional
libra-rians could solve the problem as Central-Libraries. After the foundation, some
years later, of two Central-Libraries on trial — and these stood the test
splendidly — Lange’s ideas were adopted in 1920 in the Danish
Public-Libraries Act and brought about the development of 26 Central-Libraries
which have become the sustaining power for Danish Library Service and
had deciding importance for the additional building and the further extension
of libraries all over the country.
In every County such a Central-Library is now to be found (two in
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