BALLINGER,+John+(Sir)

BALLINGER, Sir John (1860-1933) Cardiff 1875; CL Doncaster 1880; CL Cardiff 1884; 1CL National Library of Wales 1909-1930 One of the greatest of British librarians, he so built up the CARDIFF service that it ranked among the very best of its time; its pioneering work in the collecting and cataloguing of Welsh literature was paralleled by exceptional service to children and to schools. Early gifts to the NLW made the Welsh collections outstanding from the outset but the general collections had to be built up //ab initio//; legal deposit afforded by the Copyright Act of 1911 provided for the future but earlier material had all to be acquired. Ballinger, who was active in the LA, played an important part in securing the Public Libraries Act of 1919 and directed the Summer Schools held at Aberystwyth between 1917 and 1928. He was knighted in 1930 and had been LA President in 1922 and an Honorary Fellow from 1929. M A Bloomfield 'Sir John Ballinger: librarian and educator' //(////LH//, Spring 1973, //pp//1-27)

b. Portnewynydd, Mon. 1875 assistant librarian, Cardiff LA Council member

(YB 1897, 135) M. A. Bloomfield, ‘ Ballinger, Sir John (1860–1933) ’, rev., //Oxford Dictionary of National Biography//, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 31 Aug 2008

See also [|paper by Andrew Green] (of unknown purpose)