Used while designing a new public library or another type of public building, its cases provide suggestions about layout, way-finding, and other issues facing designers.
The public library, however, still awaits its history.
But it is also precisely for this reason that the plan to open a public library gave rise to strong objections.
We need, therefore, to bring libraries, and especially the public library, back into the heart of our analysis of the culture of the nineteenth-century city.
All this is informed by a sense of the changing historical context which framed the expansion of public library provision.
In the latter case, there is an adoption of a pre-existent meta-knowledge component (for example, residing in a public library), and the cost is related to familiarisation and installation issues.
For too long the public library has been seen as socially and politically neutral, in part because the detailed chronologies which constituted its history rarely thought to raise such issues.
The fear of seeing elected municipal representatives disrupt this delicate balance by building a public library was most strongly felt by several francophone elites, headed by the clergy.
