National library

[4] In England, Sir Richard Bentley's Proposal for Building a Royal Library published in 1694 stimulated renewed interest in the subject.

This new institution was the first of a new kind of museum – national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to the public and aiming to collect everything.

[8] The museum's foundations lay in the will of the physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, who gathered an enviable collection of curiosities over his lifetime which he bequeathed to the nation for £20,000.

[11] The first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759,[12] and in 1757, King George II granted it the right to a copy of every book published in the country, thereby ensuring that the museum's library would expand indefinitely.

At the death of Charles VI, this first collection was unilaterally bought by the English regent of France, the Duke of Bedford, who transferred it to England in 1424.

The appointment of Jacques Auguste de Thou as librarian in the 17th century, initiated a period of development that made it the largest and richest collection of books in the world.

The collections increased steadily by purchase and gift to the outbreak of the French Revolution, at which time it was in grave danger of partial or total destruction, but owing to the activities of Antoine-Augustin Renouard and Joseph Van Praet it suffered no injury.

After the establishment of the French First Republic in September 1792, "the Assembly declared the Bibliotheque du Roi to be national property and the institution was renamed the Bibliothèque Nationale.

The Royal Letters Patent that he granted, the predecessor of the current legal deposit requirement, made it mandatory for printers to submit a copy of every book printed in Spain to the library.

A year later, women were allowed access to the library for the first time, after a petition from writer Antonia Gutiérrez was granted by Queen Regent Maria Christina.

[18][19] In 1780 the Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth granted the Library the right to receive a free legal deposit copy of every book printed in the country.

[18][17] Following the Treaty of Riga of 1921, most of the manuscripts of Zaluski Library and a large proportion of the prints were returned to Warsaw from Soviet Russia.

[17] During World War II the most valuable part of the National Library's holdings – almost 800,000 registered items (including c. 50,000 manuscripts destroyed by German Nazis) – were lost forever.

The cornerstone of the foreign-language department came from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the form of Załuski's Library (420,000 volumes), nationalized by the Russian government at the time of the partitions.

After the failure of the revolution the library was abandoned and the stock of books already in existence was stored at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

The international nature of the book publishing industry ensures that all significant English language publications from elsewhere in the world are also included.

One of the main goals of a national library is fulfilling their nation's part of the common international goal of union cataloguing and/or universal bibliographic control, by ensuring the bibliographic control of all the books or book-like documents published in that particular country or talking about that particular country, in any way.

The first part of the goal is usually achieved through the means of legal deposit laws or (as is the case of the United States) by a host of different programs such as a cataloguing in publication service.

Another one of the main goals of many a national library is the "export aspect" and the collaborative sides of the universal bibliographic control of all the books in the world.

This is done by the exchanges and accords mentioned in the previous section, and also by fostering the creation of standard conceptual tools such as library classification systems and cataloguing rules.