library school, educational institution providing professional training for librarians (see also library). Librarians were trained by apprenticeship until the late 19th cent. The first school for training librarians was established by Melvil Dewey in 1887. The success of this institution, combined with a shortage of librarians in a period of growth and expansion, led to a proliferation of such schools, many of which were inadequate. With the formation of the Association of American Library Schools in 1915, standards of accreditation were established and maintained. A number of university schools of library service were established in the 1920s, many of them funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

In 1999, 56 U.S. and Canadian institutions offering training in librarianship were accredited by the American Library Association. These schools require a minimum of five years' study beyond the secondary level: The four years of undergraduate study constitute a general education in the humanities and natural and social sciences; the fifth year is in professional study at the graduate level and leads to a master's degree. The first school to confer the doctoral degree in library science was the Univ. of Chicago. Some of the schools are part of a university (as at the Univ. of Illinois); others are at independent undergraduate institutions (e.g., Pratt Institute). As libraries adopted the use of computer databases and on-line catalogs, the schools added a broader range of courses in information science and technology in order to acquaint future librarians with a variety of media.

The first library school outside the United States and Canada was founded at the Univ. of London in 1917. In many underdeveloped countries, university library schools have been established by grants from UNESCO and other sources, employing at the outset European- or American-trained staff. This staff is replaced as soon as possible with local personnel. Although the number of non-American library schools has steadily increased, many foreign librarians are still trained in the United States.

library, a collection of books or other written or printed materials, as well as the facility in which they are housed and the institution that is responsible for their maintenance. Modern libraries may contain a wide range of materials, including manuscripts and pamphlets, posters, photographs, motion pictures, and videotapes, sound recordings, and computer databases in various forms.

The Modern Library

Modern libraries, in addition to providing patrons with access to books and other materials, often publish lists of accessions and may maintain a readers' advisory service. Interlibrary loan services, lecture series, public book reviews, and the maintenance of special juvenile collections are other important recent developments. Three systems of book classification are widely used to facilitate access to library collections: the Dewey decimal system of Melvil Dewey, the system of Charles Ammi Cutter, and the Library of Congress system (see catalog). Since the 1930s public library systems have had several technological tools at their disposal, including microphotographic techniques for copying, computer data banks enabling the storage of far more information and the search of indexes and catalogs far more quickly than ever before, and computer networks that provide instant access to materials in libraries throughout the world and to the Internet and its increasingly rich resources.

Major university libraries in the United States must work to meet an enormous demand for research materials and spend nearly $5 million a year for books and related supplies such as binding materials. Preservation of pulp-based paper, which becomes brittle after a few decades, has become a major drain on library resources; many libraries will no longer acquire books that are not printed on acid-free paper. Such libraries typically have private endowments as well as receive federal and state support. Other libraries throughout the world operate on far smaller budgets, frequently with severe financial handicaps.

The architectural design of modern public libraries in the United States has placed the highest priority on functionalism. Outstanding examples of library construction include the central housing for collections in New York City (1911), Los Angeles (1926; major renovation 1993), Baltimore (1932), and San Francisco (1996) and university buildings at Columbia (1896; no longer a library) and Harvard (1915). Modern buildings tend toward modular construction and smaller, separate housing for special collections.

See also library school.

Evolution

The earliest known library was a collection of clay tablets in Babylonia in the 21st cent. B.C. Ancient Egyptian temple libraries are known through the Greek writers. Diodorus Siculus describes the library of Ramses III, c.1200 B.C. The extensively cataloged library of Assurbanipal (d. 626? B.C.) in Nineveh was the most noted before that at Alexandria. The temple at Jerusalem contained a sacred library. The first public library in Greece was established in 330 B.C., in order to preserve accurate examples of the work of the great dramatists. The most famous libraries of antiquity were those of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy I, which contained some 700,000 Greek scrolls. The library at Pergamum, founded or expanded by Eumenes II, rivaled those at Alexandria.

The first Roman libraries were brought from Greece, Asia Minor, and Syria as a result of conquests in the 1st and 2d cent. B.C. Caius Asinius Pollio established (c.40 B.C.) the first public library in Rome, but the great public libraries of the Roman Empire were the Octavian (destroyed A.D. 80) and the Palatine (destroyed c.A.D. 190) and the more important Ulpian library, founded during the reign of Trajan. In addition to these public collections, there were many fine private libraries by the time the Roman Republic was ended in 27 B.C. Of these there remain only fragments of one at Herculaneum.

The early Christian libraries were in monasteries; the Benedictines amassed a fine collection at Monte Cassino. The Romans had brought book collections to the British Isles, but important early monastic libraries were founded in York, Wearmouth, Canterbury, and elsewhere in England and Ireland by Anglo-Saxon monks. Some of the finest manuscript illumination was produced in these libraries. On the Continent, St. Columban and other missionaries founded monastic libraries in the 6th cent. Most of the ancient Greek and Latin texts that have survived until modern times were preserved in medieval European monastery libraries.

The Arabs in the 9th to 15th cent. collected and preserved many libraries, and the Jews and the Byzantines also developed fine libraries during the medieval period. In the 14th and 15th cent. Charles V of France, Lorenzo de' Medici, and Frederick, duke of Urbino, all formed fine libraries; part of the Urbino library is now in the Vatican Library. In the 15th cent. the Vatican Library, the oldest public library in Europe, was formed. In 1475, Platina, as its first librarian, made a catalog that included 2,527 volumes. In 1257 the Sorbonne library at Paris was founded, and in 1525 the erection of the Laurentian Library in Florence, designed by Michelangelo, was begun. Many of the great university libraries (e.g., Bologna, Prague, Oxford, and Heidelberg) were opened in the 14th cent.

In the United States a circulating library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, was chartered in 1732 on the initiative of Benjamin Franklin. A public library had, however, been opened in Boston as early as 1653 (see Boston Public Library). Other early subscription libraries included the Boston Athenaeum, the New York Society Library, and the Charleston (S.C.) Library Society. In 1833 the first tax-supported library in the country opened at Peterborough, N.H. The American Library Association was formed in 1876, and this organization spurred improvements in library methods and in the training of librarians.

Libraries in the United States and Great Britain benefited greatly from the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, who gave more than $65 million for public library buildings in the United States alone and strengthened local interest by making the grants contingent upon public support. Among the innovations of the late 19th cent. were free public access to books (involving elaborate classification schemes) and branch libraries or deposit stations for books in many parts of cities; in the early 20th cent. traveling libraries, or "bookmobiles," began to take books to readers in rural or outlying areas.

Notable Libraries

Among the chief modern public and university libraries are the Bibliothèque nationale and the Mazarine, Paris; the British Museum, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Vatican Library, Rome; the Ambrosian Library, Milan; the Laurentian Library, Florence; the Russian State Library, Moscow; the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (see under Huntington, Henry Edwards); the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the New York Public Library; the libraries of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and other major American universities; and the Newbery and John Crerar libraries in Chicago.

There are several sorts of libraries in the United States and elsewhere that exist apart from the public and university systems. Three major categories of these are private libraries, usually housing special collections, e.g., the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City of rare books in the humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. (see under Folger, Henry Clay); presidential libraries, which contain the papers of past presidents not held in the Library of Congress, e.g., the Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta, Ga., the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kans., the Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Mich., the Rutherford B. Hayes Library, Fremont, Ohio, the Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library at the Univ. of Texas, Austin, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y., and the Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Mo.; and industrial libraries formed by many corporations to house research works relevant to their business.

Vatican Library, in Rome, founded in the 4th cent. but dormant until given new life in the 15th cent. by Pope Nicholas V. It is the oldest public library in Europe and one of the chief libraries of the world. It is constituted primarily as a manuscript library. The first major librarian, Platina (Bartolommeo de' Sacchi), made a catalog of some 2,500 volumes. The library now holds more than 75,000 manuscripts and more than 1.1 million printed books, including some 8,500 incunabula. These figures do not include the vast Vatican archives, a separate collection of more than 150,000 items, and a collection of more than 300,000 coins and medals. Facilities of the library have been greatly improved in the 20th cent., although the staff and funding remain small. With funds supplied principally by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, librarians from the United States did much work (1927-30) in cataloging and classifying the contents of the library. Microfilms of most of the library's great manuscript collection were deposited at St. Louis Univ. in 1957.

Russian State Library (RSL), Russia's national library, located in Moscow; the largest library in Europe and the second largest in the world (the Library of Congress is the largest). Moscow's first public library, the RSL was founded in 1862 as the library portion of the Moscow Public Museum and Rumyantsev Museum. In 1924 it was renamed for V. I. Lenin, who, after the Russian Revolution, played an important role in its reorganization, supplementing its original collection with the contents of many confiscated private collections. The following year it became the country's national library. Renamed the Russian State Library in 1992, it has its main headquarters in a grand collonaded building constructed from the 1930s through the 50s. Russia's national book depository, the RSL now has a collection of more than 41 million items in Russian and 247 other languages. It includes some 16.5 million books and brochures, 13 million journals, 650,000 newspapers, and 1.2 million serials. Among its specialized collections are maps, printed music, manuscripts, rare and precious books, and art publications. Among its other buildings is Pashkov House, a reconstructed and restored late-18th-century neo-Palladian mansion that originally housed the museum and library and now contains the manuscript and map collections as well as exhibition space.

Pierpont Morgan Library, originally the private library of J. Pierpont Morgan, in 1924 made a public institution by his son J. P. Morgan as a memorial to his father (see Morgan, family). The library is privately supported; it is located at Madison Ave. and 36th St., New York City. It consists of the original Beaux-Arts building (1906) designed by McKim, Mead & White, a 1928 annex, and a modern addition (2006) designed by Renzo Piano. The library is especially rich in illuminated manuscripts and in authors' manuscripts (including works by Dickens, Scott, and Balzac); it has hundreds of Bibles in all languages, one of the largest collections of Aldine Press editions (see Aldus Manutius), and the only perfect copy of Malory's Morte d'Arthur printed by Caxton. The publications of the library include monographs, catalogs of collections and exhibits, reprints, and fascimiles. It is open to scholars for research and to the general public for exhibitions and lectures.

Newberry Library: see under Newberry, Walter Loomis.

New York Public Library, free library supported by private endowments and gifts and by the city and state of New York. It is the one of largest libraries in the world. The library was created by a 1895 law consolidating older reference libraries established by bequests of John Jacob Astor (1848) and James Lenox (1876), with the Tilden Trust. In 1897 New York City agreed to build and equip a central building on the site of the Croton reservoir on Fifth Ave. between 40th and 42d St. The building, designed by J. M. Carrère and Thomas Hastings, was completed in 1911. The branch system absorbed several independently endowed circulating libraries, and 39 branches were built with money donated by Andrew Carnegie in 1901.

In addition to the main building, collections are also housed at a second midtown branch, an annex for newspapers and patents, and 82 branch libraries. A circulating and reference branch devoted entirely to the performing arts is located at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture is one of the finest collections of its kind in the world. The enormous and fully computerized Science, Industry, and Business Library, located at Madison Avenue and 34th Street in midtown, opened in 1996. The largest project undertaken by the library since 1911, it features a variety of traditional and ultramodern facilities and resources. In 1999 the library opened its Center for Scholars and Writers in a suite at the main building. Directed by historian Peter Gay, the Center draws on library collections to foster creative writing and thinking, advance scholarship, and sponsor public events, and appoints 15 participating fellows annually.

The research library contains more than 10,000,000 volumes. The library has especially fine collections on Americana, art, economics, folklore, music, black history and literature, New York City, Jewish history, and Semitic languages. It has an excellent newspaper collection and is an important collector and holder of prints, manuscripts, first editions, and rare books, including the Berg collection of English and American literature.

Morgan Library: see Pierpont Morgan Library.

Library of Congress, national library of the United States, Washington, D.C., est. 1800. Thomas Jefferson while Vice President was a prime mover in the creation of the library, and he supported it strongly during his presidency. In 1814, when much of the collection was destroyed by fire, Jefferson offered his own fine library to the Congress. This formed the basis of the collection until 1851, when fire destroyed some 35,000 volumes. The growth of the library progressed slowly thereafter until the passage of the Copyright Act of 1870, which required the deposit in the library of all copyright material. The acquisition in 1866 of the Smithsonian Institution's collection of 44,000 volumes and the purchase of the Peter Force collection of Americana (60,000 volumes; 1867) and the Joseph M. Toner American and Medical Library (24,000 volumes; 1892) made it one of the world's great libraries.

Intended primarily to serve the legislative branch of the government, it is now open to the public as a reference library and sends out many books through an interlibrary loan system. It has African and Middle Eastern, Asian, European, and Hispanic divisions; a law library; and excellent collections of manuscripts, serials, incunabula, geography and maps, rare books, prints and photographs, motion pictures, music and recordings, science and technology, and computer files, representing materials in more than 450 languages. As of 1999, the Library of Congress contained some 115 million items, including about 17 million books, 4 million maps, and 50 million manuscripts. Its Online Catalog provides a database of some 12 million items from its collections. The library sells duplicate catalog entries on magnetic tape to smaller libraries for the books it adds to its collections. It provides other vital services to libraries through its many bibliographic functions (among them maintaining the National Union Catalog of the holdings of 700 large libraries in the United States and running the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped) and its Copyright Office. The library's Poetry and Literature Center (est. 1936) is the home of the U.S. poet laureate. Mainly supported by congressional appropriations, the library also has income from gifts by foundations and individuals, administered by the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board.

Lenin Library: see Russian State Library.

John Crerar Library: see Crerar, John.

John Carter Brown Library: see Brown, John Carter.

Huntington Library and Art Gallery: see Huntington, Henry Edwards.

Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery: see Huntington, Henry Edwards.

Harleian Library, manuscript collection of more than 7,000 volumes and more than 14,000 original legal documents, formed by Robert Harley, 1st earl of Oxford, and his son Edward, 2d earl of Oxford. In 1753 it was purchased for £10,000 by the British government and with the collections of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton and Sir Hans Sloane formed the basis of the British Museum library.

Folger Shakespeare Library: see under Folger, Henry Clay.

Congress, Library of: see Library of Congress.

British Library, national library of Great Britain, located in London. Long a part of the British Museum, the library collection originated in 1753 when the government purchased the Harleian Library, the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, and groups of manuscripts. The collection grew four years later when George II donated his royal library, and was considerably enlarged with the addition of George III's library in 1823. It flourished in the 19th cent. under the leadership of Sir Anthony Panizzi. The library remained a part of the museum until 1973 when it was made a separate entity by act of Parliament. The museum complex was famous for its large, copper-domed Round Reading Room, for 140 years (1857-1997) the haunt of an array of scholars, authors, and other luminaries. In 1997 the library was moved to vast new quarters at London's King's Cross. Designed by British architect Colin St. John Wilson, the new library is spacious and multileveled, with four large reading rooms and several exhibition areas. Traditionally a nonlending reference library with manuscript and printed books divisions, the library now has large lending and bibliographic departments and is the copyright depository library for Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Outstanding works in its collection include a unique papyrus of Aristotle, four original Magna Cartas, Beowulf, the 4th-century Greek Codex Sinaiticus Bible, a Gutenberg Bible, Froissart's Chronicles, and the Diamond Sutra (868), probably the oldest surviving printed book.

Boston Public Library, founded in 1852, chiefly through the gift of Joshua Bates. It is the oldest free public city library supported by taxation in the world. Its present building on Copley Square, designed by McKim, Mead, and White, was completed in 1895. The main hall is decorated with murals by Puvis de Chavannes. Other rooms have murals by Edwin Abbey and John S. Sargent. The library holds more than 4 million volumes; its special collections include Spanish and Portuguese literature; histories of printing, the theater, and the women's rights movement; the libraries of John Adams and Nathaniel Bowditch; and the Albert H. Wiggin collection of paintings and etchings. The library opened a new wing designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee in 1973.

Bodleian Library, at the Univ. of Oxford. The original library, destroyed in the reign of Edward VI, was replaced in 1602, chiefly through the efforts of Sir Thomas Bodley, who gave it valuable collections of books and manuscripts and in his will left a fund for maintenance. The library has one of the great collections of English books, including a major Shakespearean section; its extensive manuscript collection is especially rich in biblical and Arabic material. A new building for the library was opened in 1946.

American Library Association, founded 1876, organization whose purpose is to increase the usefulness of books through the improvement and extension of library services. As the major professional association for librarians and libraries, it seeks to maintain high standards for all branches of library service through functions ranging from the accreditation of library training schools to the recognition of outstanding books. The association was involved in early attempts to expand library services to all people. It supported public access to library shelves, tax-supported libraries, books made available for home loan, and research libraries sponsored by the government and major educational institutions. It fosters joint programs with the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. It has a long-standing policy of opposition to censorship, the banning of books, and violations of the user's right to confidentiality in the selection of reading materials. The organization, based in Chicago, had 58,777 members in 1999.

Ambrosian Library, founded c.1605 in Milan by Cardinal Federigo Borromeo. It became one of the earliest libraries to be opened to the public. The library's collection is rich in classical manuscripts, notably Homer and Vergil, in incunabula, and in Oriental texts. It also contains Leonardo da Vinci's profusely illustrated Codex Atlanticus.

Principles and practices of library operation and administration, and their study. It emerged as a separate field of study in the second half of the 19th century. The first training program for librarians in the U.S. was established by Melvil Dewey in 1887. In the 20th century, library science was gradually subsumed under the more general field of information science. Today's graduate programs in library and information science are accredited by the American Library Association (founded 1876) and prepare students for professional positions in other areas of the information industry as well.

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System of arrangement adopted by a library to enable patrons to locate its materials quickly and easily. Classifications may be natural (e.g., by subject), artificial (e.g., by alphabet, form, or numerical order), or accidental (e.g., chronological or geographic). They also vary in degree; some have minute subdivisions while others are broader. Widely used systems include the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress Classification, the Bliss Classification, and the Colon Classification; special libraries may devise their own unique systems.

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Collection of information resources in print or in other forms that is organized and made accessible for reading or study. The word derives from the Latin liber (“book”). The origin of libraries lies in the keeping of written records, a practice that dates at least to the 3rd millennium BC in Babylonia. The first libraries as repositories of books were those of the Greek temples and those established in conjunction with the Greek schools of philosophy in the 4th century BC. Today's libraries frequently contain periodicals, microfilms, tapes, videos, compact discs, and other materials in addition to books. The growth of on-line communications networks has enabled library users to search electronically linked databases worldwide. Seealso library science.

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Largest city public library in the U.S. and one of the great libraries of the world. It was established in 1895, and its central building opened in 1911. Its holdings include more than 10 million books and more than 10 million manuscripts, as well as large collections of pictures, maps, books for the blind, films, and microfilms.

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U.S. library, the largest and one of the greatest of what may be considered national libraries. Founded in Washington, D.C., in 1800, it was housed in the Capitol until the building was burned by British troops in 1814; it moved to permanent quarters in 1897. In addition to serving as a reference source for members of Congress and other government officers, it is outstanding among the learned institutions of the world, with magnificent collections of books, manuscripts, music, prints, and maps. It contains some 18 million books, 2.5 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.5 million maps, and more than 54 million manuscripts.

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National library of Great Britain, formed by the British Library Act (1972) and organized July 1, 1973. It consists of the former British Museum library, the National Central Library, the National Lending Library for Science and Technology, and the British National Bibliography. The British Museum library, founded in 1753 based on earlier collections and later increased by the addition of royal libraries, had the right to a free copy of all books published in the United Kingdom. Its collection included a rich series of charters (including those of the Anglo-Saxon kings), codices, psalters, and other papers ranging from the 3rd century BC to modern times. The present-day British Library receives a copy of every publication produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

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Library of the University of Oxford and one of the oldest and most important nonlending reference libraries in Britain. The Bodleian is particularly rich in Asian manuscripts and collections of English literature, local history, and early printing. Though it was established earlier, it was not secured by the university until 1410. After a period of decline, it was restored by Sir Thomas Bodley (1545–1613), a collector of medieval manuscripts, and reopened in 1602. Under provisions established in 1610 and 1662, it is a legal deposit library enh1d to free copies of all books printed in Britain.

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