Sometimes I wonder if I am in the right society.

Just after the inauguration of ARLIS, when I was still thinking about joining, there appeared in the ARLIS Newsletter (nos. 2 and 4) two short articles which suggested to me the sort of society ARLIS might become. Written by Frank Hatt, they were called ‘Is your toolkit really necessary?’ and ‘Toolkits again’. The author took the information needs of library users to be the art librarian’s first priority; he dismissed a good many bibliographical tools in our field and called for investigation by ARLIS into exactly what the needs of users of art libraries are. He was thinking on the lines of a cooperative user research project based on case studies, presumably to be published in the Newsletter.