Literature on the extent and popularity of leisure reading services in American
university libraries is somewhat contradictory. There is some evidence
that recreational reading collections were widespread in American university
and college libraries in the 1930s and 1940s (Lyle 126; Zauha 57). The
so-called “browsing room” was a comfortable environment in which undergraduate
students could easily access material that was not necessarily
related to their program of study (Young 434). Collections were provided to
develop well-rounded students with “broader interests than the horizons of
their course work” (Hamlin 140). Many recreational reading collections were
located in dormitories rather than the library but wherever they were based,
their popularity appears to have been limited. In 1942, Young (434) describes
a library browsing room as being “practically empty” while a survey of 1965
suggested that browsing collections in libraries in halls of residence were
similarly neglected with only 11%of students (compared with 44% in 1962)
reporting that they used the library “a good deal” (Line and Tidmarsh 130).
Elliott (35) suggests that university libraries had also begun to lose interest
in recreational reading collections at this time because of pressure on space
and resources and, perhaps most importantly, because faculty support for
extracurricular reading had waned. Hamlin (148) contradicts this somewhat
by suggesting that academic staff were still prepared to work with the library
to promote reading but they accepted that students now had more demands
on their time. Marks (94), on the other hand, asserts that academic staff at
the time actively complained that the browsing rooms distracted students
from their studies.