Open Shelf Room

From the earliest years, some town residents could use the College Library.  In the early 1890s Azariah Root had already extended borrowing privileges to cover town residents.  For many years, the only at-the-shelf browsing of library materials in the Oberlin College Library took place in the Town Library within Carnegie, thus the name "Open Shelf Room."  Most of these interior images shown here date from 1941.

This library thus catered to the non-academic reading needs of both the College and the town of Oberlin.  When the Oberlin Public Library moved to its present location, it left behind huge quantities of old mystery novels, popular magazines, and many works of popular fiction not generally found in academic libraries.  The "Open Shelf Room" also held a collection of Oberlin authors visible on the shelf behind the seated patrons in two of the images.