In large libraries this delivery room can have more and roomier facilities, such as settees for those waiting for books. In the Providence Public, there is an Information desk on one side, a Registration desk on the other, near the front door. It should still be on the ground floor and not far from the outside entrance. More people flock here than elsewhere, and the less tramping through corridors they do, the better for them, the readers, and for the cleanliness of the premises. When other rooms or passages open out of the delivery room, a platform slightly raised for the desk will aid supervision.
Light. To get a sufficiently central position for delivery room and strong enough light on desk and catalog, seems to be, judging by inspection of libraries and plans, an especially difficult problem; but it should not be insoluble to a clever librarian and a bright architect.
The English plans do not help us much with ideas, for their system is herein different from ours. “Fewer people go to the lending department than to the reading room,” says Duff-Brown,[240] while with most of our American libraries all readers get to these rooms through or past the delivery room. And in a “barrier lending library,” as Champneys calls it, the counter is much longer than we use, even if there is no “indicator” to elongate it.
As the size, location and relative connections of the delivery-room largely determine the convenience of the whole building, the shape, capacity and practicableness of the delivery desk determine the excellence of this department. See [p. 348].
Here the practical and ingenious librarian has his best chance in planning.
Janitor
The janitor in any library has important functions. In the smallest he is the only assistant, and can be of great service to the lone librarian in service, supervision and in substitution when she is away. In a library of any size he is housekeeper, not only assisting in handling books, but running the heating and lighting systems, superintending or performing all services of cleanliness, and often acting as special policeman in preserving order. He deserves a room of his own, even if it be a simple one in the basement. In large libraries he has a small residence suite, and is always on the premises as day janitor and night watchman. See Bostwick, p. 284, where he advises janitor’s private residence in all libraries except very small ones. But are janitor’s families always germane? I should say, only in very large libraries is it best to provide a janitor’s residence suite in the building. But in most libraries he has a home elsewhere, with only an office in the library. In this case he needs for himself only a table, tool bench, chairs, a closet for clothes and brooms, a box for tools, and a snug toilet room.
Packing room. Winsor[241] assigns this room to the basement, “a large hall, with raised platform in the center for superintendent, with stalls about the walls for successive processes, with rails running past them for book trucks.” But most of the processes he describes are now prosecuted near the catalog room or suite. The packing room is located in some convenient part of the basement, directly under the other administration rooms, with which it has direct communication by tubes and lifts. It should have a separate door to a carriageway, and in large libraries can have a package platform and freight doors opening out of it, for loading and unloading boxes of books.
The uses assigned to this room are generally packing and unpacking, central provisions for cleaning, light repairing of books and furniture, laying out for binder. Its furniture can be scant and simple: work tables or trestles against any free wall space, trucks, an adjacent closet or two, good windows on one or two sides, for light on processes, some shelves for laying out books in transit.