Library history
[3] Topics include recording mediums, cataloguing systems, scholars, scribes, library supporters and librarians.
[4] The earliest records of a library institution as it is presently understood can be dated back to around 5,000 years ago in the Southwest Asian regions of the world.
These manuscripts include 9th century Qurans and the oldest known accounts of the Islamic prophet Muhammed.
[6] The Assyrian King Assurbanipal created one of the greatest libraries in Nineveh in the seventh century BCE.
By 500 BCE both Athens and Samos had begun creating libraries for the public, though as most of the population was illiterate these spaces were serving a small, educated portion of the community.
[3] Athens developed a city archive at the Metroon in 405 BCE, where documents were stored in sealed jars.
Scholars believe the collection slowly diminished over time due to theft and efforts to remove it ahead of invading armies.
Papyrus manuscripts in Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri were encased in ash after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.
[3] Modern archaeology is now able to scan these artifacts and discern their contents, including many writings from Philodemus.
[7] In the European Middle Ages, libraries began to become more prevalent, despite a widespread reduction in new writing beyond religious themes.
[3] As more of the population became literate, new ideas like Humanism and Natural Law spawned an increase personal libraries, although they remained small.
[12] Additional models of library historical analysis include The New York Public Library: A History of Its Founding and Early Years by Phyllis Dain, a work that exemplified institutional history and The Power and the Dignity: Librarianship and Katharine L. Sharp by Laurel Grotzinger, a biographical study.
[14] Catalogs were not standardized until the late 19th century and even in the 1800s some libraries had no actual record of their holdings or relied on a brief author list.
The disadvantages of the printed book catalog, however, became more serious as library collections grew and the rate of growth increased.
Updating such a catalog meant reprinting it in its entirety, or staving off an expensive new edition by producing supplementary volumes of newly acquired works, which then made searching quite tedious.
The typewriter brought greater uniformity to the card catalog than even the neatest “library hand” could, and undoubtedly increased the amount of information that one could squeeze into the approximate three-by-five surface.
After Dewey, the person who had the greatest effect on library technology was Henriette Avram (1919–2006), creator of the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) format.
You will see uppercase characters only, limited field sizes, and often a lack of punctuation beyond perhaps a hash mark for apartment numbers.
However, libraries needed to represent actual document titles, author names, and languages other than English.
This meant that the library data record needed to have variable length fields, full punctuation, and diacritical marks.
"[16] The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) took the lead in recruiting and organizing secret expeditions to Europe, often acquiring rare materials from bookshops just before the Gestapo arrived.
Back in Washington, analysts mined the information for projects such as targeting key industrial centers, railroads and chokepoints, and identifying concentration camps and prisoner of war facilities.
They also advanced librarianship, introducing an air of mass foreign acquisitions, widespread film usage, and new techniques for rapidly extracting vital information instead of merely storing.
