Six square feet, Duff-Brown[369] and Champneys[370] consider enough to allow for every auditor, including seats, gangways and platforms. Marvin[371] says the same, but does not include platform.
For the use of audiences, while the rest of the library is working, there should be a separate outside door or wide door into a corridor directly communicating with the outside.
As such rooms are not so much used for reading, and are not high in the walls, light fixtures need not be so numerous or powerful.
Exhibitions. Where funds are scant, I doubt whether it is best to provide an art gallery for permanent or occasional exhibitions of pictures, with the necessary disposition of lights. But in sizable buildings, a large room can be spared for exhibitions directly or indirectly connected with books, and such a room can be so fitted up as to receive busts, statues and pictures presented to the library.
The center of the top floor of the main building offers an excellent position for a large room for exhibition purposes, with daylight from the roof. If suitable wall material and covers are provided as background for pictures, with picture mouldings and with glass cases for the floor, it is ready for showing specimens of printing or binding, rare books, manuscripts, or prints and engravings.
As such an apartment would not be used for reading, it may be a common corridor for many rooms opening around it, which are devoted partly to exhibition, partly to consultation; for instance, art, music and maps. Thus arranged, the top floor would segregate many functions which elsewhere might interfere with the quiet of readers; and would provide most agreeable conversation facilities.
Pamphlets. In many libraries gifts of pamphlets are received, which cannot be separately catalogued at once. It is sometimes necessary to let them accumulate until time is found to assort them, decide what to keep and what to give away, what to bind and what to file in pamphlet boxes. In small libraries they can be kept temporarily in closets. In large libraries they often assume such bulk as will fill a room. Their stay in this form is so temporary that the room assigned can be remote (in the attic, for instance, of an old house), and very plain, not even finished, except for such light as will be needed in sorting and such heating as will keep workers comfortable.
Trestle tables, kitchen chairs, rough fixed wooden wall or floor shelving, will answer all purposes, and save money for use elsewhere. When the pamphlets are boxed or made ready for binding, they need not return here, but may find their places elsewhere in the stack or special rooms.
Bound Serials. Except a few serials which cover only special subjects, these are usually kept together, for general magazines in use are somewhat like encyclopædias. They are perhaps more readable, but are not often used for reading; rather for reference through Poole and other indexes. In any considerable collection they occupy so much shelf room that they will soon fill a large room by themselves, and they are so kept in many libraries. In the Library of Congress there are 123,805 volumes of bound periodicals, 68,127 of them “general.”[372] If placed in the stack, the basement is a good assignment for them, for various reasons. If they are to have a room elsewhere it can be anywhere available; with wooden floor cases (movable shelves) and plain walls and ceiling so colored as to reflect light. As they are often heavy and awkward to handle, and as readers may want to give them a first examination on the spot, tables at one side of the room and carrels in the windows will facilitate use.
Sets of society publications are often kept in the same room with these serials.