A library is a collection of sources, resources, and services, and the structure in which it is housed; it is organized for use and maintained by a public body, an institution, or a private individual. In the more traditional sense, a library is a collection of books A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other various material, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page. A book produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book. It can mean the collection, the building or room that houses such a collection, or both. The term "library" has itself acquired a secondary meaning: "a collection of useful material for common use." This sense is used in fields such as computer science Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe, and transform information. Computer science, mathematics Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns, formulate new conjectures, and establish truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions, statistics Statistics is the formal science of making effective use of numerical data relating to groups of individuals or experiments. It deals with all aspects of this, including not only the collection, analysis and interpretation of such data, but also the planning of the collection of data, in terms of the design of surveys and experiments, electronics In semiconductor design, standard cell methodology is a method of designing application-specific integrated circuits with mostly digital-logic features. Standard cell methodology is an example of design abstraction, whereby a low-level VLSI-layout is encapsulated into an abstract logic representation (such as a NAND gate). Cell-based methodology ( and biology In molecular biology, a library is a collection of DNA fragments that is stored and propagated in a population of micro-organisms through the process of molecular cloning. There are different types of DNA libraries, including cDNA libraries and genomic libraries (formed from genomic DNA). DNA library technology is a mainstay of current molecular. It can also be used by publishers in naming series of related books, e.g. The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Libraries often provide a place of silence Silence is the relative or total lack of audible sound. By analogy, the word silence may also refer to any absence of communication, even in media other than speech. Silence is also used as total communication, in reference to non verbal communication and spiritual connection for studying.

Public and institutional collections and services may be intended for use by people who choose not to — or cannot afford to — purchase an extensive collection themselves, who need material no individual can reasonably be expected to have, or who require professional assistance with their research. In addition to providing materials, libraries also provide the services of librarians A librarian is an information professional trained in library and information science, which is the organization and management of information services or materials for those with information needs. Typically, librarians work in a public or college library, an elementary or secondary school media center, a library within a business or company, or who are experts at finding and organizing information and at interpreting information needs.

However, with the sets and collection of media and of media A data storage device is a device for recording information (data). Recording can be done using virtually any form of energy, spanning from manual muscle power in handwriting, to acoustic vibrations in phonographic recording, to electromagnetic energy modulating magnetic tape and optical discs other than books for storing information Recording is a process of capturing data or translating information to a format stored on a storage medium often referred to as a record, many libraries are now also repositories and access points for maps A map is a visual representation of an area-a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes, prints A print room is either a room or industrial building where printing takes place, or a room in an art gallery or museum, where a collection of old master and modern prints, usually together with drawings, watercolours and photographs, are held and viewed. The latter meaning is the subject of this article. A further meaning is a room decorated by, or other documents A document , is a bounded physical or digital representation of a body of information designed with the capacity (and usually intent) to communicate. A document may manifest symbolic, diagrammatic or sensory-representational information. To document (verb) is to produce a document artifact by collecting and representing information. In and various storage media such as microform Microforms are any form, either films or paper, containing microreproductions of documents for transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced about 25 times from the original document size. For special purposes, greater optical reductions may be used (microfilm/microfiche), audio tapes, CDs, cassettes The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. Although originally designed for dictation, improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Its uses ranged from portable, videotapes Videotape is a means of recording images and sound on to magnetic tape as opposed to movie film or random access digital media. Videotapes are also used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram. In most cases, a helical scan video head rotates against the moving tape to record the data in two, DVDs DVD, also known as Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc, is an optical disc storage media format, and was invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Time Warner in 1995. Its main uses are video and data storage. DVDs are of the same dimensions as compact discs , but are capable of storing just under seven times as much data, and video games A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device. The word video in video game traditionally referred to a raster display device. However, with the popular use of the term "video game," it now implies any type of display device. The electronic systems used to. Libraries may also provide public facilities to access subscription databases and the Internet The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and.

Thus, modern libraries are increasingly being redefined as places to get unrestricted access to information Information, in its most restricted technical sense, is an ordered sequence of symbols. As a concept, however, information has many meanings. Moreover, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation in many formats and from many sources. They are understood as extending beyond the physical walls of a building, by including material accessible by electronic means, and by providing the assistance of librarians in navigating and analyzing tremendous amounts of information with a variety of digital tools.

Early history

Antiquity

The first libraries were composed for the most part, of published records A document , is a bounded physical or digital representation of a body of information designed with the capacity (and usually intent) to communicate. A document may manifest symbolic, diagrammatic or sensory-representational information. To document (verb) is to produce a document artifact by collecting and representing information. In, a particular type of library called archives An archive is a collection of historical records, as well as the place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime. Archaeological findings from the ancient city-states Whereas nation-states rely on a common heritage, be it linguistic, historical, economic, etc., the city-state relies on the common interest in the function of the urban center. The urban center and its activity supplies the livelihoods of all urbanites inhabiting the city-state of Sumer Sumer was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. It is the earliest known civilization in the world and is known as the Cradle of Civilization. The Sumerian civilization spanned over 3000 years and began with the first settlement of Eridu in the Ubaid period (mid 6th millennium BC) through the Uruk period (4th have revealed temple rooms full of clay tablets From the 4th millennium BCE in the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite civilizations of the Mesopotamia region, cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed. Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water in cuneiform script Cuneiform script is the earliest known writing system in the world. Cuneiform writing emerged in the Sumerian civilization of southern Iraq around the 34th century BC during the middle Uruk period, beginning as a pictographic system of writing. Cuneiform was the most widespread and historically significant writing system in the Ancient Near East. These archives were made up almost completely of the records of commercial transactions or inventories, with only a few documents touching theological matters, historical records or legends. Things were much the same in the government and temple records on papyrus Papyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt of Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. The civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh, and it developed over the next three millennia. Its history.

The earliest discovered private archives were kept at Ugarit Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra رأس شمرة ("top/head/cape of the wild fennel" in Arabic), near Latakia, Syria) was an ancient cosmopolitan port city, sited on the Mediterranean coast. Ugarit sent tribute to Egypt and maintained trade and diplomatic connections with Cyprus (called Alashiya), documented in the archives recovered from the; besides correspondence and inventories, texts of myths may have been standardized practice-texts for teaching new scribes. There is also evidence of libraries at Nippur Nippur , from the Sumerian for 'lord wind' (Enlil), is modern Nuffar in Afak Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate, Iraq. Nippur was one of the most ancient of all the Sumerian cities. It was the special seat of the worship of the Sumerian god, Enlil, ruler of the cosmos subject to An alone about 1900 B.C. and those at Nineveh Nineveh , an "exceeding great city", as it is called in the Book of Jonah, was an ancient city on the eastern bank of the Tigris in ancient Assyria. Its ruins are across the river from the modern-day major city of Mosul, in the Ninawa Governorate of Iraq about 700 B.C. showing a library classification A library classification is a system of coding and organizing library materials according to their subject and allocating a call number to that information resource. Similar to classification systems used in biology, bibliographic classification systems group entities that are similar together typically arranged in a hierarchical tree structure. A system.^[1]

Over 30,000 clay tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, named after Ashurbanipal, the last great king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, is a collection of thousands of clay tablets and fragments containing texts of all kinds from the 7th century BC. Due to the sloppy handling of the original material much of the library is irreparably jumbled, making it impossible for have been discovered at Nineveh Nineveh , an "exceeding great city", as it is called in the Book of Jonah, was an ancient city on the eastern bank of the Tigris in ancient Assyria. Its ruins are across the river from the modern-day major city of Mosul, in the Ninawa Governorate of Iraq,^[2] providing archaeologists with an amazing wealth of Mesopotamian literary, religious and administrative work. Among the findings were the Enuma Elish The Enûma Eliš is the Babylonian creation myth (named after its opening words). It was recovered by Austen Henry Layard in 1849 (in fragmentary form) in the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (Mosul, Iraq), and published by George Smith in 1876, also known as the Epic of Creation,^[3] which depicts a traditional Babylonian view of creation, the Epic of Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from Mesopotamia and is among the earliest known works of literary writing. Scholars believe that it originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems about the mythological hero-king Gilgamesh, which were gathered into a longer Akkadian epic much later. The most complete version existing today is preserved,^[4] a large selection of "omen texts" including Enuma Anu Enlil which "contained omens dealing with the moon, its visibility, eclipses, and conjunction with planets and fixed stars, the sun, its corona, spots, and eclipses, the weather, namely lightning, thunder, and clouds, and the planets and their visibility, appearance, and stations",^[5] and astronomic/astrological texts, as well as standard lists used by scribes and scholars such as word lists, bilingual vocabularies, lists of signs and synonyms, and lists of medical diagnoses.

Libraries in the Hellenic world and Rome

Private or personal libraries made up of non-fiction Non-fiction or nonfiction is an account, narrative, or representation of a subject which an author presents as fact. This presentation may be accurate or not; that is, it can give either a true or a false account of the subject in question. However, it is generally assumed that the authors of such accounts believe them to be truthful at the time and fiction Fiction is any form of narrative which deals, in part or in whole, with events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary and invented by its author(s). Although fiction often describes a major branch of literary work, it is also applied to theatrical, cinematic, documental, and musical work. In contrast to this is non-fiction, which deals books (as opposed to the state or institutional records kept in archives) appeared in classical Greece in the 5th century BC. The celebrated book collectors of Hellenistic Hellenistic civilization represents the zenith of Greek influence in the ancient world from 323 BC to about 146 BC ; note, however that Koine Greek language and Hellenistic philosophy and religion are also indisputably elements of the Roman era until Late Antiquity. It was immediately preceded by the Classical Greece period, and immediately Antiquity Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, collectively known as the Greco-Roman world. It is the period in which Greek and Roman literature (such as Aeschylus, Ovid, Homer and others) flourished were listed in the late 2nd century in Deipnosophistae The Deipnosophistae may be translated as The Banquet of the Learned or Philosophers at Dinner or The Gastronomers. The Deipnosophists is a long work of literary and antiquarian research by the Hellenistic author Athenaeus of Naucratis in Egypt, written in Rome in the early 3rd century AD. The protagonist is Ulpian, the host of a leisurely banquet:^[6]

Polycrates of Samos Polycrates , son of Aeaces, was the tyrant of Samos from c. 538 BC to 522 BC and Pisistratus Peisistratus (ca 6th c BCE – 527 or 528 BCE) was a tyrant of Athens from 546 to 527/8 BCE. His legacy lies primarily in his institution of the Panathenaic Festival and the consequent first attempt at producing a definitive version for Homeric epics who was tyrant of Athens, and Euclides who was himself also an Athenian^[7] and Nicorrates of Samos and even the kings of Pergamos Pergamon, Pergamum or Pérgamo was an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey, in Mysia, today located 16 miles (26 km) from the Aegean Sea on a promontory on the north side of the river Caicus (modern day Bakırçay), that became the capital of the Kingdom of Pergamon during the Hellenistic period, under the Attalid dynasty, 281–133 BC. Today,, and Euripides Euripides (ca. 480 BC – 406 BC) was the last of the three great tragedians of classical Athens (the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles). Ancient scholars thought that Euripides had written ninety-five plays, although four of those were probably written by Critias. Eighteen or nineteen of Euripides' plays have survived complete. There has the poet and Aristotle Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most the philosopher, and Nelius his librarian; from whom they say our countryman^[8] Ptolemæus, surnamed Philadelphus, bought them all, and transported them, with all those which he had collected at Athens and at Rhodes to his own beautiful Alexandria.^[9]

All these libraries were Greek; the cultivated Hellenized diners in Deipnosophistae pass over the libraries of Rome in silence. By the time of Augustus there were public libraries near the forums of Rome: there were libraries in the Porticus Octaviae near the Theatre of Marcellus The Theatre of Marcellus is an ancient open-air theatre built in the closing years of the Roman Republic. At the theatre, locals and visitors alike were able to watch performances of drama and song. Today its ancient edifice in the rione of Sant'Angelo, Rome, once again provides one of the city's many popular spectacles or tourist sites. It was, in the temple of Apollo Palatinus, and in the Bibliotheca Ulpiana in the Forum of Trajan Trajan's Forum is chronologically the last of the Imperial fora of Rome. The forum was constructed by the architect Apollodorus of Damascus. The state archives were kept in a structure on the slope between the Roman Forum The Roman Forum, also known by its original Latin designation , is located between the Palatine Hill and the Capitoline Hill of the city of Rome, Italy. Citizens of the ancient city referred to the location as the "Forum Magnum" or just the "Forum". It is part of the centralised area around which the ancient Roman civilization and the Capitoline Hill.

Private libraries appeared during the late republic: Seneca inveighed against libraries fitted out for show by non-reading owners who scarcely read their titles in the course of a lifetime, but displayed the scrolls in bookcases (armaria) of citrus wood inlaid with ivory that ran right to the ceiling: "by now, like bathrooms and hot water, a library is got up as standard equipment for a fine house (domus).^[10] Libraries were amenities suited to a villa, such as Cicero's at Tusculum, Maecenas's several villas, or Livy the Younger's, all described in surviving letters. At the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, apparently the villa of Caesar's father-in-law, the Greek library has been partly preserved in volcanic ash; archaeologists speculate that a Latin library, kept separate from the Greek one, may await discovery at the site.

In the West, 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 copying was normally done in the room itself. The surviving 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 arrangement for Greek and Latin texts.

Libraries were filled with parchment scrolls as at Library of Pergamum and on papyrus scrolls as at Alexandria: export of prepared writing materials was a staple of commerce. There were a few institutional or royal libraries which were open to an educated public (like the Library of Alexandria, once the largest library in the ancient world), 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.

In the 6th century, at the very close of the Classical period, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world remained those of Constantinople and Alexandria. Cassiodorus, minister to Theodoric, established a monastery at Vivarium in the heel of Italy with a library where he attempted to bring Greek learning to Latin readers and preserve texts both sacred and secular for future generations. As its unofficial librarian, Cassiodorus not only collected as many manuscripts as he could, he also wrote treatises aimed at instructing his monks in the proper uses of reading and methods for copying texts accurately. In the end, however, the library at Vivarium was dispersed and lost within a century.

Through Origen and especially the scholarly presbyter Pamphilus of Caesarea, an avid collector of books of Scripture, the theological school of Caesarea won a reputation for having the most extensive ecclesiastical library of the time, containing more than 30,000 manuscripts: Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Jerome and others came to study there.

With education firmly in Christian hands, however, many of the works of classical antiquity were no longer considered useful.^{[citation needed]} Old texts were washed off the valuable parchment and papyrus, which were reused, forming palimpsests. As scrolls gave way to the new book-form, the codex, which was universally used for Christian literature, old manuscript scrolls were cut apart and used to stiffen leather bindings.^{[citation needed]}

Ancient Chinese libraries

The imperial library is the earliest known Chinese library, with history dating back to the Qin Dynasty. Han Chinese scholar Liu Hsiang established the first library classification system during the Han Dynasty,^[11] and the first book notation system. At this time the library catalog was written on scrolls of fine silk and stored in silk bags.

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