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It is requested that this article be . Please improve it in any way that you see fit, and remove this notice and the listing on the request page once the article is no longer a stub.
In its traditional sense, a library is a collection of books. It can refer to an individual's private collection, but more often, it is a large collection that is funded and maintained by a city or institution, and is shared by many people who could not afford to purchase so many books by themselves.
However, with the collection or invention of media other than books for storing information, many libraries are now also repositories and/or access points for maps, prints or other artwork, microfilm, microfiche, audio tapes, CDs, LPs, video tapes and DVDs, and provide public facilities to access CD-ROM databases and the Internet.
Thus, modern libraries have been redefined as places to get access to information in any format, whether it is stored inside the building or not.
The word is derived from Latin liber, which means "book." Derivations from the Greek Bibliotheke (from Biblos, book) are used in at least German, French, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and of course Modern Greek. Other languages, such as Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian and Persian, use words that derive from their own words for book (Bokasafn, Kirjasto, and Raamatukogu and Ketabkhaneh, respectively).
The first libraries were only partly libraries, being composed for the most part of the unpublished records that make up archives. Archeological findings from the diggings of the ancient city-states of Sumer have revealed temple rooms full of clay tablets in cuneiform script. These archives were made up nearly completely of the records of commercial transactions or inventories, with only a few documents touching theological matters or legends. Things were much the same in the Papyrus based government records of Ancient Egypt.
Private or personal librairies made up of non-fiction and fiction books, (as opposed to the state or institutional records kept in archives) first appeared in classical Greece. The first ones appeared some time near the 5th century before our era. They were filled with parchment scrolls and later on papyrus scrolls . There were a few institutional or royal libraries like the Library of Alexandria, which were open to an educated public but on the whole, collections were private. In those rare cases where it was possible for a scholar to consult library books there seems to have been no direct access to the stacks. In all recorded cases the books were kept in a relatively small room where the staff went to get them for the readers, who had to consult them in an adjoining hall or covered walkway.
The first public libraries were established under the Roman Empire as each succeeding emperor strove to open one or many which outshone that of his predecessor. Unlike the Greek libraries readers had direct access to the scrolls, which were kept on shelves built into the walls of a large room. Reading or copy was normally done in the room itself. The records give only a few instances of lending features. As a rule Roman public libraries were bilingual: They had a Latin room and a Greek room. Most of the large Roman baths were also cultural centers, built from the start with a library, with the usual two room arrangment for greek and latin texts.
Little is known about early Chinese librairies, save what is written about the imperial library which began with the Qin Dynasty. One of the curators of the imperial library in the Han Dynasty is believed to have been the first to establish a library classification system and the first book notation system. At this time the library catalog was written on scrolls of fine silk and stored in silk bags.
During the dark ages after the fall of the Western roman empire and before the rise of the large christian monastery libraries, Islamic librairies knew a period of great expansion in the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and Spain. Like the Christian libraries they mostly contained books which were of a codex or modern form instead of scrolls. By the 8th century the arabs had imported the craft of paper making from China, with a mill already at work in Bagdad in 794. By the 9th century completely public libraries started to appear in many arab cities. They were called "halls of Science" or dar al-'ilm . They were each endowed by islamic sects (many of which have disappeared or become less important in our times) with the purpose of representing their tenets as well as promoting the dissemination of secular knowledge. The libraries often employed translators and copyists in large numbers, in order to render into arab the bulk of the available Greek and Roman non-fiction and the classics of Persian literature. After but a few centuries most of these libraries were destroyed by violent strife between the sects in the larger cities of the Islamic world. But by then much of their contents had been copied in the more tranquil settlements in Spain and Sicily, and from there they often made their way to Christian Europe.
The medieval library arose very directly from the fact that books were valuable possessions, were therefore likely to be stolen, and were far too expensive for most people to own. Its architecture derived from the need to chain these books, first to lecterns and later to armaria and shelves, in areas that were illuminated by sunlight. Early libraries were located in monastic cloisters associated with scriptoria and were collections of lecterns with books chained to them. Shelves built above and between back-to-back lecterns were the beginning of bookpresses. The chain was attached at the fore-edge of a book rather than to its spine. Book presses came to be arranged in carrels (perpendicular to the walls and therefore to the windows) in order to maximize lighting, with low bookcases in front of the windows. This stall system (fixed bookcases perpendicular to exterior walls pierced by closely spaced windows) was characteristic of English institutional libraries. In Continental libraries, bookcases were arranged parallel to and against the walls. This wall system was first introduced on a large scale in Spain's El Escorial.
As books became cheaper, the need for chaining them lessened, but as the number of books in libraries increased, so did the need for compact storage and access with adequate lighting, giving birth to the stack system, which involved keeping a library's collection of books in a space separate from the reading room, an arrangement which arose in the 19th century. Book stacks quickly evolved into a fairly standard form in which the cast-iron and steel frameworks supporting the bookshelves also supported the floors, which often were built of translucent blocks to permit the passage of light (but were not transparent, for reasons of modesty). With the introduction of electrical lighting, the use of glass floors was largely discontinued, though floors were still often composed of metal grating to allow air to circulate in multi-story stacks.
Ultimately, even more space was needed, and a method of moving shelves on tracks ("national libraries, one noteworthy example being the U.S. Library of Congress.
Libraries usually have nearly every item they own arranged in a specified order according to a library classification system, so that particular items may be located quickly and collections may be browsed efficiently. Libraries often feature a professional librarian working from a reference desk or other central location to help users find what they are looking for.
Many potential library patrons nevertheless do not know how to use a library effectively, often from lack of early exposure, or are anxious and fearful of displaying ignorance. These problems drove the emergence of the library instruction movement, which advocates library user education. Library instruction has been practiced in the U.S. since the 19th century. One of the leaders of the library instruction movement in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is Michael Lorenzen. Library instruction is closely related to the study of information literacy.
Libraries must inform the public of what materials are available in their collections, and the public must know how to access that information. Before the computer age, this was accomplished by the card catalog -- a piece of wooden or metal furniture containing many drawers, each filled with standard-sized index cards identifying books and other materials. In a large library, the card catalog units often filled a large room, or else lined most hallways in the building. The emergence of the Internet, however, has led to the adoption of electronic catalog databases (often referred to as "webcats" or as OPACs, for "online public access catalog"), which allow users to search the library's holdings from any location with Internet access. This style of catalog maintenance is compatible with new types of libraries, such as digital libraries and distributed libraries, as well as older libraries that have been retrofitted.
Basic tasks in library management include the planning of acquisitions (which materials the library should acquire, by purchase or otherwise), library classification of acquired materials, preservation of materials (especially rare and fragile archival materials such as manuscripts), patron borrowing of materials, and developing and administering library computer systems. More long-term issues include the planning of the construction of new libraries or extensions to existing ones, and the development and implementation of outreach services and reading-enchancement services (such as adult literacy and children's programming).
Other libraries:
Some libraries devoted to a single subject:
For more extensive lists, see
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