It has been definitely ascertained that 6 per cent. of the population of the average town become borrowers. For this number the average stock of books provided in lending libraries is three per borrower. Books are kept out on an average ten days each, or twelve days non-fiction, eight days fiction. In a year of 306 days each borrower will read about thirty books. Here, then, is a basis from which to start in providing accommodation for a lending library. If a town has 50,000 inhabitants, it will attract 3000 borrowers, who will require 9000 volumes as a minimum lending stock. The annual issue should be 90,000 volumes. It follows that the minimum lending library accommodation in a case like this should comprise shelving for 9000 volumes, and lobby or other spaces for at least seventy-five persons present at one time. In theory an issue of 300 per day should mean an average hourly attendance of thirty per hour, but in actual practice it must be recognized that borrowers attend at uncertain parts of the day, and most commonly during the last two or three hours in the evening; therefore it is safe to allow for the accommodation of at least one-fourth of the daily average number of visitors. Many lending libraries are overshelved owing to a failure to recognize the possibility of revision of stock and the equally important fact that the best shelving for books is in the homes of the people.
The same rules apply to all the other departments.
CHAPTER IX
SITES AND PLANS
112.
112. This chapter is of a purely practical character, with illustrations from well-known examples of library plans. Except in the necessary precautionary remarks made already, it has been thought undesirable to dwell upon the elevations of libraries and the relative desirability of façades, although much might be said upon the subject and it is worthy of careful attention. Such a discussion, however, could be useful only if a long series of illustrations were given ranging say from the New York and Pittsburgh public libraries, the National Library of Wales, the Liverpool Public Library and the Mitchell Library at Glasgow, which are large and handsome architectural edifices, to the more modest but satisfactory small buildings such as those at Bromley, Herne Hill and Wallasey. Although a certain common character is to be found in smaller municipal library elevations, and especially in Carnegie libraries, there is no distinctive type of elevation peculiar to libraries which immediately suggests the purpose of the buildings. This is one of the things to be desired in British architecture, as it is fair to expect that such buildings should be both artistic and appropriate, if such results can be reached without the sacrifice of even more important considerations.
113.
113. It is premised that all central libraries require certain departments, including reference and lending libraries, newspaper room, magazine (or periodicals) room, children’s room, lecture room, and administrative departments—librarian’s office, cataloguing room, store rooms, staff rooms, cloak rooms, etc. Too often the provision made for administrative and staff purposes is inadequate, and the library suffers greatly in consequence. Branch libraries do not, as a rule, have reference rooms, although accommodation for a collection of quick-reference books is necessary, and in many branch libraries newspaper and magazine rooms are combined. All the apartments premised above are not present in all buildings. Older libraries have no separate provision for children, and indeed work with children on a large scale is quite a recent development of library activity, but the desirability of such a department is made clear in [Division XIII.] Lecture rooms are rarer still, because of the peculiar view taken by legal authority that lectures are not within the province of libraries; and in some of the larger cities lecture work is adequately carried out by other institutions. A modern librarian, however, regards a lecture room as a necessary part of his building, and even in the larger cities lectures which are purely library lectures, having a direct bearing upon the use of books, can be given satisfactorily only in direct connexion with the library.