Simple, central, inexpensive administration, with tubes or telephones to different rooms and departments; a central position in the college group or building, ample provision for growth, as gifts come in—these points suggest themselves.
At the St. Louis Conference in 1889, a suggestion was made that inasmuch as the library is the heart of a university, it should be given a central position from which the other buildings should radiate.[39]
University. Many universities are so large that most of their problems have been suggested in the chapter on Very Large Libraries.
Here the question of seminar or department libraries becomes acute. In some respects it is analogous to that of branches to a public library, but it is far more complicated.
How many departments are to be provided for; how far can they be served from the main library; if they are to have separate libraries, how large should these be; do they need permanent libraries, or only books sent from time to time; how far shall they duplicate the contents of the central library; how far shall they have department librarians under control of the general librarian? All these questions affect the planning of buildings.
Law and medicine generally have separate buildings and separate administration. As to other departments, systems vary in universities. Indeed, no two seem to have the same system. The one adopted at Brown is simple, inexpensive, efficient. This assigns all the departments to a separate building, not far from the central library, and connected with it by telephone, tunnel, and mechanical carrier. This building has a central room for one attendant. Round him are grouped the reference books needed by all departments, and any professor, through him, can call books at will from the delivery desk at the main library. In this arrangement each department can have its own shelving, and its head can have an adjoining private room, with convenient storage for his own books and papers.
A system, some variety of which seems common, provides wings or galleries on various floors for the seminar rooms, more or less conveniently served from the main library.
Other universities have their departments dotted around the grounds, wherever they happen to have been placed from time to time, without apparent reference to the library, and served from it only by messenger.
Others have seminar rooms built in various forms near the library building, with bridges or arcades between, by which they have access to their own branch of literature, stored in an adjacent part of the library.