Occupying a small nook among the vast buildings nestled along Boston’s Court Square is the Kirstein Business Branch of the Boston Public Library.

Its boutique-like entrance belies the vast resources this comely but diminutive three-story building holds.

Curator Dolores Schueler said the branch presents an opportunity for its librarians to become experts on one subject: business.

“It’s also a great place. People appreciate the information they get here even more than at the main library, if that’s possible,” she said.

“It gets very heavy use,” said Bernard Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library. “It’s been around since 1930. The first separate business branch library [donated by a businessman] in the country. We’re very proud of it,” he said. It was the second business-only library branch in the nation.

The branch boasts 10 librarians, said Schueler. Unlike other branches of the library, no materials are circulated. “I like to think of this as a place [to which] people come not to do scholarly research but financial,” she said, explaining that much of the collection reflects the real market rather than the theoretical models often available in university libraries.

“Its [the Kirstein branch’s] history is rather interesting,” said Margolis. One of the trustees of the library, Louis Kirstein, donated the money to construct and furnish the building on the site of the old police station which, at the time, was adjacent to City Hall. “We were literally in Government Center at that time,” said Schueler. Kirstein, then a vice president at Filene’s department store, dedicated the branch to the memory of his father, Edward, on its opening on May 7, 1930.

According to the history of the building available on its Web site, the architects modeled the facade after a row of 26 brick houses designed by Charles Bulfinch on the curving south side of Franklin Street.

“Because of our storefront operation, people run in at lunchtime,” said Schueler. Many businesspeople come in to use its vast collection of directories and never realize there are second and third levels, she joked.

The branch has directories in a broad range of business-related fields, from manufacturing to financial and other trade-specific areas. In fact, more than two walls are taken up with telephone directories. “We keep them because no one else does, really, and it’s a good resource for business people,” Schueler said. While some directories are available online, the information is spotty, making the branch’s resources valuable.

One of the major attractions of the library to lawyers and accountants is the Standard & Poor’s daily stock price record. Patrons can look up historical stock prices back through 1962, all readily accessible on the first floor. Stock prices older than that are kept in the basement. But all a person need do is call. “We’ll do that [research] over the telephone, which is one of the services we offer,” said Schueler. While the librarian can simply quote the price of a stock over the phone, the library provides up to a three-page fax free at request. About 40 to 50 faxes go out each month through the service, she said. “It’s nice to actually have it in hand.”

The atmosphere portrayed by patrons, that of tense focus, belies the demands placed on the staff, which alone answers between 60 and 80 reference questions phoned in per day.

“So say [a person] worked in a trust department in a bank and had to, for tax purposes, value a stock that somebody bought in 1940. We’d have all the historical records of that stock – all the splits, all the dividends, all the mergers, all the changes. And actually, in a way, that is fairly easy to research,” said Margolis.

‘Practical’ Place

But while the branch holds literally tons of financial information, there really is no typical patron, said Margolis. “There’s really no average. The range is from people who are interested in researching consumer products to people who are researching stock prices, to people who are developing business plans, to students, to people looking for jobs or thinking about career changes. Anything soup-to-nuts to do with business in the largest context of that [word],” he said.

“We’ve always been a very practical business library,” said Schueler. “We buy the materials people can use now.”

During a tour of the library, available to the public the first Wednesday of each month, Schueler pulls out a text to exemplify the scope of the holdings. “‘Who’s Who in Egg and Poultry’ is one of my favorites,” she said.

The library is also a great fount of information for people starting out a small business who are researching their target markets. They can look at studies breaking down such minutia as the reading habits of people in individual ZIP codes around the state.

“We don’t get everything, obviously, but we do have quite a good selection,” she said.

In addition to the dozens of trade journals and other specialized periodicals, there are dozens of databases available to patrons. “And these are things that your customers would have to pay dearly to subscribe to that are all free at the library,” said Margolis. An entire shelf is reserved for current Moody’s reports.

Although the physical space of the branch has not been expanded, Margolis said the library is in the midst of other substantial changes. The staff has been augmented and includes a member who specializes in electronic resources, which is a reflection of one of the major changes in how business information is delivered, he said.

“Then we have someone that’s very focused on helping businesses in the area of economic development. That means everything from small businesses that need information resources to help them grow to large companies, ad agencies, even trade journals that may need additional information resources to be more profitable,” said Margolis.

Annual reports for public companies are kept on hand for 10 years and on microfiche dating back to the mandatory disclosure law of 1967.

Much of the information is available through the library’s Web site. According to Margolis, the BPL site gets 6 million hits a month. “It seems to me people are more self-sufficient” online, said Schueler. But she’s happy to help people navigate what can become a labyrinth of links.

Schueler, who has spent 18 years at the Kirstein, said the information the library provides is just staggering. Margolis said the most challenging point in the future will be finding a way to use the library’s limited space to house more and more information. The branch is currently creating an online database and the entire BPL is in the process of installing a new electronic card system.