CITY HAS OUTGROWN THE
PUBLIC LIBRARY BUILDING.
Librarian Whitney Calls Attention
to This in Her Current Quar-
terly Report.
In her twenty-seventh annual report of the public library, Mrs. Carrie Whitney, the librarian, makes a plea for more room and explains the conditions that will soon make an expansion of the building necessary.
"An addition equal in size to the present building has become imperative," says Mrs. Whitney. "In the two small rooms used for the children are shelved over 15,000 volumes to accommodate the 18,000 children, 'under 18' card holders. This condition is only relieved by the twenty-one ward school substations and the three high school loan collections.
"The large reading room is so heavily patronized during the winter that the chair and table accommodations are entirely exhausted.
"In the fiction room, formerly the cataloguing room, are shelved 12,000 volumes with absolutely no more shelf space.
"A very much needed and necessary department is a room shelved around the walls, furnished with tables and chairs, where current non-fiction may be placed under the eyes and hands of the reading public.
"The administrative departments cannot do efficient work in the crowded quarters provided -- a part of the catalogue staff had to be transferred to a space back of the delivery desk, to the annoyance of patrons and superintendent, who are interrupted in their inquiries by the clicking of two typewriters."
Mrs. Whitney also explains that the newspaper room filled with bound volumes of the city papers is full, and that all available space in the building is in use at the present time.
The public has been an unusually honest one this year, judging from the report. Only eighty-seven books were "unaccounted for" in the fiction room and 107 in the children's room, while but twenty-four were lost form the miscellaneous shelves.
Mrs. Whitney's report appears in the Public Library quarterly, which was out yesterday.
