ABSTRACT
William Frederick Poole’s unbuilt scheme for a library from 1881 was the first to propose the decentralized departmental concept based, in this case, on a four-story library, planned in multiple phases. The scheme was subsequently adopted by Poole and Henry Ives Cobb in their 1893 design for the Newberry Library in Chicago—a privately-supported, public, non-circulating research library, which Poole directed. Increasingly, library professionals expressed dissatisfaction with functional shortcomings of facilities that impeded basic library operations, arguing for a more utilitarian approach to storing, accessing, organizing, and using books, especially in large libraries. Despite the operational inefficiencies of Poole’s approach, decentralization and departmentalization were a dominant influence in the planning and design of large municipal libraries throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Expanded collections eventually required additional book storage, which, for efficiency, was housed in a separate stack tower on the back side of the library.
