The children's department in a large library should contain at
least two large rooms, one for the reading and reference room,
the other for the circulating books. The rooms should be light,
bright and cheery, as daintily artistic and as immaculately clean
as it is possible to make and keep them. Wall cases seem best for
the shelving of the books, low enough for the children to reach
the shelves easily. These low cases also allow wall space above
for pictures, and plenty of this is desirable. A children's room
cannot have too many pictures,[1] nor any which are too fine for
it; choose for it pictures which are fine, and pictures which
"tell a story." Provide, also, plenty of space for bulletins, for
the picture bulletins have become an important factor in the
direction of the children's reading. One enthusiastic children's
librarian wrote me recently that her new "burlap walls, admitting
any number of thumb-tacks" were the delight of her heart. There
should be reading tables and rubber- tipped chairs, low ones for
the little children; and wherever there is space for them, the
long, low seats, in which children delight to snuggle down so
comfortably.
[1] If this paper were now open to revision, the writer would
omit "cannot have too many pictures." The reaction against bare,
bleak walls may not make it necessary to warn against
over-decoration, but its undesirability should he recognized.--L.
A. E.
As to the arrangement of the books, I should divide them into
three distinct classes for children of different ages:
(1) The picture books for the very little ones, arranged
alphabetically.
(2) The books for children from seven to ten or twelve years of
age. While these books should be classified for the cataloging, I
should place them on the shelves in one simple alphabetical list
by authors, mixing the fiction, history, travel, poetry, etc.,
just as they might happen to come in this arrangement. I believe
this would lead the children to a more varied choice in their
reading, and that they would thus read and enjoy biography,
history, natural science, etc., before they learned to
distinguish them from stories, whereas by the classified
arrangement they would choose their reading much more often from
the one class only.
(3) The books for boys and girls from ten or twelve years of age
to fifteen or sixteen. These should be arranged on the shelves
regularly according to class number, in order that the children
may become acquainted with the classification and arrangement,
learn to select their books intelligently, and be prepared to
graduate from here into the adult library.
Where it is possible to duplicate the simple and more common
reference books in the juvenile department, these should form a
fourth class. Then there should be all of the good juvenile
periodicals, with some of the best illustrated papers, such as
Harper's weekly, for the reading room.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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