The colleges will more and more recognize the relations of libraries to instruction and the relations of the building to the library. Large cities will experiment with large library buildings as the crown of their educational system.
Library science also will still progress ahead of its building problems. Where its developments are to end no one can foretell. What Bostwick[14] defines as the chief modern features of American libraries—freedom of access, work with children, co-operation with schools, branch libraries of all kinds, all such expanding activities—are sure to spread still further on the lines of social science, industrial education and good citizenship, reaching out, as Mr. Dana says, for the mechanic and the artisan.
In building there will be serious problems to be worked out. To college libraries will come the great question of the economical and effective distribution of department libraries. In all large libraries the problem presses of how to store closely and still handily the masses of accumulating books; underground stacks, central artificially lighted book rooms, sliding presses, mechanical carriers. In all large centers are impending the enormous warehouses[15] of the future for dead or moribund books, literary tombs or morgues.
I see another question impending,—Cannot modern methods of steel construction help out the city problems of light and congestion? Is the massive masonry, which has made such dungeons out of most of our public buildings, necessary for libraries? In view of the universal opinion among librarians that every building will have to be changed, enlarged, or replaced within a short generation, in view of the fact that thick walls kill the light needed for readers, that masonry partitions hinder change, may not the structure that makes our modern stores and office buildings so light, cheerful and airy, be in some satisfactory way applied to our large libraries?
Of one thing we may be fairly sure. Intelligent alliance and the friendship of mutual respect between librarians and architects will so carry conviction to trustees that our buildings of the near future will seem workable to librarians, satisfactory to architects, and noble to the public.
For the remoter future our successors must plan. We do our share if we pass on to them bettered methods and finer buildings.
Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas
The motto I have chosen for this work is the maxim embodying three essential qualities in building, as given by Vitruvius, the leading authority in his profession, in his work “De Architectura Libri Decem” issued over nineteen hundred years ago at the highwater tide of the classical style of architecture which some of his modern successors have copied too blindly, forgetting that the conditions of our firmitas and utilitas have essentially changed and modified the twentieth century venustas.