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 Dewey, Melvil, 1851–1931, American library pioneer, originator of the Dewey decimal system, b. Adams Center, N.Y., grad. Amherst (B.A., 1874; M.A., 1877).
..... Click the link for more information. , the system of Charles Ammi Cutter Cutter, Charles Ammi, 1837–1903, American librarian, b. Boston. Cutter cataloged the library of the Harvard Divinity School and in 1860 was appointed as the assistant to the librarian of Harvard.
..... Click the link for more information. , and the Library of Congress system (see catalog catalog, descriptive list, on cards or in a book, of the contents of a library. Assurbanipal's library at Nineveh was cataloged on shelves of slate. The first known subject catalog was compiled by Callimachus at the Alexandrian Library in the 3d cent. B.C.
..... Click the link for more information. ). 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 Internet, the, international computer network linking together thousands of individual networks at military and government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, industrial and financial corporations of all sizes, and commercial enterprises
..... Click the link for more information. 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 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.
..... Click the link for more information. .

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 Alexandria, Arabic Al Iskandariyah, city (1996 pop. 3,328,196), N Egypt, on the Mediterranean Sea. It is at the western extremity of the Nile River delta, situated on a narrow isthmus between the sea and Lake Mareotis (Maryut).
..... Click the link for more information. , founded by Ptolemy I, which contained some 700,000 Greek scrolls. The library at Pergamum Pergamum (pûr`gəməm), ancient city of NW Asia Minor, in Mysia (modern Turkey), in the fertile valley of the Caicus.
..... Click the link for more information. , 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 illumination, in art, decoration of manuscripts and books with colored, gilded pictures, often referred to as miniatures (see miniature painting ); historiated and decorated initials; and ornamental border designs.
..... Click the link for more information. 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 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.
..... Click the link for more information. ). 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 Carnegie, Andrew (kärnĕg`ē, kär`nəgē), 1835–1919, American industrialist and philanthropist, b.
..... Click the link for more information. , 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 Bibliothèque nationale (bēblēōtĕk` näsyônäl`)
..... Click the link for more information. and the Mazarine, Paris; the British Museum British Museum, the national repository in London for treasures in science and art. Located in the Bloomsbury section of the city, it has departments of antiquities, prints and drawings, coins and medals, and ethnography.
..... Click the link for more information. , London; the Bodleian Library Bodleian Library (bŏd`lēən, bŏdlē`ən), at Oxford Univ.
..... Click the link for more information. , Oxford; the Vatican Library 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.
..... Click the link for more information. , Rome; the Ambrosian Library Ambrosian Library (ămbrō`zhən), founded c.1605 in Milan by Cardinal Federigo Borromeo.
..... Click the link for more information. , Milan; the Laurentian Library, Florence; the Russian State Library, Moscow; the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (see under Huntington, Henry Edwards Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery has the largest collection of incunabula in America; it excels also in rare legal documents showing the growth of English and American constitutional law, Americana (especially West Coast material), and manuscript collections of English
..... Click the link for more information. ); the Library of Congress 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.
..... Click the link for more information. , Washington, D.C.; the New York Public Library 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.
..... Click the link for more information. ; 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 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.
..... Click the link for more information. in New York City of rare books in the humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. (see under Folger, Henry Clay Emily Jordan Folger (d. 1936), was his associate in this work. Their collection, quietly acquired, became one of the largest and most valuable of its sort in the world. The

Folger Shakespeare Library, east of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
..... Click the link for more information. ); 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.

Bibliography

The classic works on the history of libraries are E. Edwards's Memoirs of Libraries (2 vol., 1859, repr. 1964) and Libraries and Founders of Libraries (1865, repr. 1968). See also E. A. Savage, The Story of Libraries and Book-Collecting (1909, repr. 1969); T. Eaton, ed., Contributions to American Library History (1962); R. Irwin, Origins of the English Library (1958, repr. 1981); K. Schottenloher, Books and the Western World (1989); M. H. Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World (4th ed. 1995); K. G. Saur, ed., World Guide to Libraries (13th ed. 1997); American Library Directory 1999–2000 (52nd ed. 1999); L. Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (2001); M. Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (2003).

library

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. See also library science.

(1) A collection of programs or data files.

(2) A set of ready-made software routines (functions) for programmers. The routines are linked into the program when it is compiled. See class library.

(3) A storage device that handles multiple units of media and provides one or more drives for reading and writing them. For example, a tape library holds multiple tape cartridges and includes a robotic mechanism that moves them in and out of the drive(s).

(4) See data library.

(programming, library)

library - A collection of subroutines and functions stored in one or more files, usually in compiled form, for linking with other programs. Libraries are one of the earliest forms of organised code reuse. They are often supplied by the operating system or software development environment developer to be used in many different programs. The routines in a library may be general purpose or designed for some specific function such as three dimensional animated graphics.

Libraries are linked with the user's program to form a complete executable. The linking may be static linking or, in some systems, dynamic linking.