Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/260

250 contrivances may easily put into the hands of the public several thousand books in a day. It may serve a good purpose in so doing. It may find its proper field in performing part of the book-lending work in any large library. But it certainly can not compete, from an educational point of view, with a service in which the attendant puts himself for the moment in the inquirer's place, and himself goes to the shelves with an intelligent interest in the inquirer's wants.

Near the counter should be the catalogue room; and the private official catalogue of the library should be open to the public, if possible. Such an arrangement saves much costly duplication. It is also desirable to have the information about the library's books which is stored up in the catalogue room made available for the public at short notice.

Near the delivery room and not far from the main book room should be a special room for children, in which may be kept all juvenile literature, so arranged that the children may make their own choice from the shelves. This will prove a strong attraction to the young people, will increase their use of books of the better class, will free other parts of the library from the disturbance children necessarily entail, and will save time and labor at the delivery counter.

The room for reference work, if the whole library is not thrown open for this purpose, must be not far from the main book room, must be near the catalogue, and should be near the delivery counter. It should be so planned that those who come to the library simply for a book, or to ask a question, or on sight-seeing, will not be compelled to pass through it.

The retiring rooms and lunch rooms for assistants, the conversation or class rooms for special work, the rooms for rough work—as mending or binding and the manual part of the preparation of books for the shelf—the periodical room, and the newspaper room can all be placed at a distance from the library's real center, the delivery counter; though the last two must be near enough to the reference room to make it easy for readers in the latter to consult the current numbers of magazines and journals.

The office of the librarian in charge should be near to the delivery room, and preferably not far from either catalogue or reference room.

The books in the public library should be selected with reference to the people who will use them. The people who make use of the free public library are, sixty per cent or more of them, readers of little but the newspapers, the popular magazine, and novels. The reading room should supply, and generously, the newspaper and the periodical. The circulating department should put much thought and much energy into fiction. The fiction