Welsh Journals

enabled county councils to establish public library services to serve rural areas that had not benefited from earlier legislation. The only exceptions to this were a few small libraries set up by some progressive parish councils, and those authorities awarded grants by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust to establish experimental rural library schemes following the publication of the Adams report in 1915. Despite the expansion of the public library service to areas that had, by that time, become the main strongholds of the Welsh language, their influence on the indigenous culture remained marginal. Once again, one of the key explanations for this was the restricted service that local councils were able to provide from their very limited budgets. However, the ability of these libraries to provide Welsh-language materials was also frustrated by the low quality and narrow subject matter of most of the new titles produced. For example, in 1933 Arthur ap Gwynn delivered a paper to the annual conference of public library authorities in Wales where he not only noted that the number of new titles published was small but that Welsh authors and publishers catered 'for the taste of a century which is dead and gone'.7 What was far more significant than the content of Gwynn's paper, however, was the fact that the convenors of the conference saw fit to include a discussion of the relationship between Welsh- language books and public library authorities in Wales in their programme. Nevertheless, despite this new awareness of a responsibility to meet the needs of Welsh-speakers amongst some public librarians, no significant progress was made until the 1950s, by which time there had been a sharp decline in the Welsh- speaking population and the Welsh book industry had reached a state of crisis. Ironically, this crisis coincided with the threshold of unparalleled expansion in public services as Wales, in line with the rest of the United Kingdom, was about to enjoy a period of relative prosperity. This period also saw a growing interest in the role that the public library could play to actively promote the Welsh language and culture in addition to simply providing a collection of books and other printed materials.