A simple room of moderate size and height, simply furnished, with wall shelving or floor cases for pedagogic literature will answer all purposes for teachers, committees and interested citizens.
Its position would best be near the school or children’s department, using the same entrance.
It might also be used for teachers with classes, for laying out and sending out books to schools, or for a school reference department.
Indeed, as all Art rooms may properly be grouped together and assigned to the same floor, all rooms connected with children, schools, teachers, or education should be shared, or grouped together with a common entrance, corridor, or stairway.
Lectures. There seems to be a difference of opinion in this country as to the necessity or even the advisability of giving up space to assembly rooms or lecture rooms.
“In a small building an assembly room is a nuisance,” says Bostwick.[366] See, however, his enumeration quoted under Rooms for Classes,[367] of the uses to which an assembly room has been put in a St. Louis branch.
In England, lecture rooms among progressive libraries are considered essential.[368]
It seems to me that a part of the basement, in all buildings which have basements, can generally be spared for a fairly large room to be put to a variety of uses, which even if not directly germane to the use of books, are proper work for a neighborhood club, which is what the modern small or branch library is coming to be. A fine room can be made under radial bookcases.
It is not necessary, or wise to have a sloping floor such as is used in colleges or public halls; too much height would be wasted by the slope. Nor need the platform be large or high;—a foot high, enough for store-room under it, through trap doors, for such extra camp chairs as are needed for audiences; with enough light, removable tables, and light chairs for all uses to which the room might be put; a dead white wall back of the platform, and such arrangements as would allow stereopticon exhibitions; effective ventilation for a full room, even with the low ceilings of a basement, and you have provision for many needs of a small library. In larger buildings larger rooms may be provided, but always such as could be used in various ways, at different hours of day or night.