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.