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This rapid sketch has gleaned the records to show how the housing of libraries has grown through centuries toward a rapid development in our own age.

The Present. In looking back through the last sixty years, indeed through the last quarter-century, we contrast twenty-five years ago with the present time. We cannot fail to be satisfied with the advance in rational building. We know better what we want; we are called more into consultation with our trustees as to what is wanted; our opinions are listened to with respect by the architects. If every building is not as perfect as we could wish, how much larger is the proportion of serviceable libraries; how much smaller is the number of stately failures? Turn over the plans in Koch’s portfolio of Carnegie Libraries. See how much better is the average interior, how much more satisfactory the fenestration and proportions of the average exterior. In the “Points of Agreement among Librarians,” adopted as our chart in 1891, it was stated that “very few library buildings erected during the previous ten years conformed to all, and some of them conformed to none, of these axiomatic requirements.” Could we not say now that nearly all library buildings erected since 1891 conformed to most and many to all of what have seemed to us the requisites of construction?

The Next Quarter Century. What has the future in store for us?

In the first place, a swarm of buildings. Private beneficence, already aroused and stimulated, will continue for at least another generation even after Carnegie shall pass on to his reward. Public opinion in a large part of our country has come to believe in the library as it believes in the schools. Small libraries will follow railway stations into all growing and ambitious towns. Communities now inert will awake and, as instruments for good, demand libraries to stand beside their churches. The buildings of today will soon burst their bounds in the flood of library progress, and require enlargement or replacement.

The colleges will more and more recognize the relations of libraries to instruction and the relations of the building to the library. Large cities will experiment with large library buildings as the crown of their educational system.

Library science also will still progress ahead of its building problems. Where its developments are to end no one can foretell. What Bostwick[14] defines as the chief modern features of American libraries—freedom of access, work with children, co-operation with schools, branch libraries of all kinds, all such expanding activities—are sure to spread still further on the lines of social science, industrial education and good citizenship, reaching out, as Mr. Dana says, for the mechanic and the artisan.

In building there will be serious problems to be worked out. To college libraries will come the great question of the economical and effective distribution of department libraries. In all large libraries the problem presses of how to store closely and still handily the masses of accumulating books; underground stacks, central artificially lighted book rooms, sliding presses, mechanical carriers. In all large centers are impending the enormous warehouses[15] of the future for dead or moribund books, literary tombs or morgues.

I see another question impending,—Cannot modern methods of steel construction help out the city problems of light and congestion? Is the massive masonry, which has made such dungeons out of most of our public buildings, necessary for libraries? In view of the universal opinion among librarians that every building will have to be changed, enlarged, or replaced within a short generation, in view of the fact that thick walls kill the light needed for readers, that masonry partitions hinder change, may not the structure that makes our modern stores and office buildings so light, cheerful and airy, be in some satisfactory way applied to our large libraries?

Of one thing we may be fairly sure. Intelligent alliance and the friendship of mutual respect between librarians and architects will so carry conviction to trustees that our buildings of the near future will seem workable to librarians, satisfactory to architects, and noble to the public.

For the remoter future our successors must plan. We do our share if we pass on to them bettered methods and finer buildings.