Special reference rooms are even provided in some libraries, and in the largest buildings teachers’ rooms adjoin, so as to bring all school influences into the same suite and system.
Bostwick[333] advises (why?) that shelving should be confined to the walls if possible.
In planning, the librarian should determine the scheme he will adopt for treating this problem, and a room or portion of a room or a suite of rooms should be assigned and fitted after the latest and most approved manner.
Discussion is still active, and new methods are developed yearly with constantly improving conveniences.
In England this movement appears to be viewed with some distrust. Duff-Brown[334] speaks of “the epidemic raging in the United States.” But he devotes four paragraphs to it, and Champneys[335] three pages. The latter, quoting Clay’s School Buildings, gives an interesting formula of heights of seats and tables for children of different ages, though he thinks it difficult to get the small children to use low tables and the reverse. He also specifies the need of low hand rails for children on stairs; even two rails, one for adults, one for children.
See Marvin, pp. 12, 17, 18; Dana, Lib. Pr., 167; Bostwick, 78, 85; L. J. 1897, p. 181; Conf. 19, 28; 10 P. L. 346.
Women’s Rooms
The separation of boys and girls, usually by a low hand rail, is favored in children’s rooms, by obvious parallelism with school customs, but the separation of men and women into different rooms has never been common in America, although separate tables are sometimes assigned to “the use of ladies.” But no “woman’s room” is a necessity to consider in planning. In England it has been different. Duff-Brown[336] reports eighty women’s rooms among over four hundred public libraries there, but he pronounces them unnecessary. Champneys[337] also thinks them “an indifferent success.” “Experience has proved that a separate room for women is unnecessary.”—(Burgoyne.[338]) If that is the verdict where they have been extensively tried, there seems to be no good precedent for wasting space on them in American libraries.
In various discussions of this subject, it has been stated that women sometimes use tables set aside for them, but not special rooms, and that such rooms require closer supervision, because the few who use them are more apt to mutilate or deface books and periodicals than any other class of readers.