Good location and light for the public catalog make one test of the excellence of your plan.
Bulletin Boards
One thing often forgotten in planning is to leave available wall space where necessary bulletins can be hung and easily read,—a practical detail not always seen by the artistic eye. Everyone has seen dome and rotunda libraries, all columns and no wall.
In planning, however, it is not hard to assign opportunities in spaces sufficiently well lighted, but of no use otherwise, for hanging bulletin boards, or so treating walls as to serve that purpose without special boards. Lobbies, vestibules, corridors, stairways, spacious delivery rooms, even railings outside, invite such use. In England, want-lists are cut out from the daily papers, mounted on boards, and thus hung outside the library for inspection by the unemployed.
Places for bulletins should also consider—they do not always—near-sighted people, and the undersized. Even in such unprosaic matters, careful planning in every phase can promote the usefulness of the library. I remember being shown about a new dome library in the west, where the librarian turned in distress and asked, “Do tell me where I can put up my bulletins or lists.” The only thing I could suggest was that she should get her architect to design a Parisian kiosk, to be set in the centre of the useless floor space, under the wasted heights of the dome; and use the exterior of the kiosk for bulletins, the interior for the brooms, for which no closet had been provided.
Miss Marvin[398] suggests spaces over radiators, shelves, periodical cases, and book bins. An ordinary screen, like those used in bar-rooms in any “wide-open” town, placed in the center of vestibule or hall would offer two sides for lists and bulletins posted at any convenient height.
If you have seen how masts going up through the cabins of river boats or coasters are backed with mirrors, you have a hint where to put bulletin boards in buildings on which columns have been inflicted.
Other Fittings
These vary so much with the grades and classes of libraries, they change so much as inventions are made from time to time, that I go into no further details here, but advise librarians who build to examine each item they want to use, in the light of the last improvements and the experience of fellow-librarians.
[Burgoyne gives thirty-two pages, illustrated, to English devices.]
Clocks, thermometers and barometers are especially recommended by Duff-Brown.[399] Clocks (noiseless) will be useful in many rooms, also thermometers, but we do not watch barometers so much in the United States as our English cousins do.
A page in your note book devoted to furniture and gear, when you start out on a reconnoissance among other libraries, will fix many fleeting impressions which may come into use later.
And in your trips may sharp eyes and keen common sense travel with you!