IN A SENSE the position of university librarian has become an impossible one. It is expected that a university librarian should be an expert technical librarian, a splendid administrator, a first-rate public relations man, a scholar whose learning and insight should be the equivalent of a doctorate in a hundred-odd departments, and a human being besides. Stated this way, we know we are discussing a that did not, does not, and never will exist. He is like the economic man our economists set up and tear down from time to time. If he lives, he lives in the imagination or the hazy and mystical future. It is assumed, therefore, that we are not discussing such a fiction or even such a man to shoot at. What we are discussing is a who is to serve most usefully university scholars and students in a learned atmosphere. Starting from this point, we may note that technical library school training is valuable, but not the most important item in his training. Help for that purpose should be readily available in his staff. In fact, it is easy to imagine a first-rate university librarian without this training. More essential is intensive study in some one broad field of knowledge, most probably the equivalent of the work for the Doctor's degree. T o obtain a doctorate would be most desirable. Its purpose is an intimate acquaintance with the problems which scholars and competent students meet in pursuing their work. These problems, if understood by the librarian, will be found to be more than simple bibliography, or a net-work of bibliographical tools capable of catching items which uncover materials and roads to knowledge. It will include some comprehension of the sources of that field and the numerous directions in which they lead, as well as the reverse. Once this training has been secured, it will react on all his judgments and relations. It will teach him fundamentals, obtainable in no other way. Having had this academic training, but necessarily lacking similar information and training in the hundred other fields of knowledge, such a librarian should be able to consult those who know, to pursue patiently and intelligently the purpose of building collections and of finding numerous other ways of serving scholarship. Such men will necessarily have some facility in the reading of French and German, if not also other languages.