THE LIBRARY: AN INTRODUCTION

Different groups of people use libraries: teachers and students, youngsters and the elderly, police and plumbers and politicians. Each group, each person has different library needs. Because no one library can handle all needs, there are different kinds of libraries, and libraries share materials with each other.

A Difference in Libraries

No two libraries are exactly alike. But some have more in common than others.
Because the money to run a public library comes from taxes, it is a free library for the public everyone who lives in a certain neighborhood, city, county, or province. Such a library serves all ages and groups as an information center, as a reading-and-viewing-and-listening-for-pleasure library. There were early types of public libraries in ancient Greece and Rome. However, they did not lend materials freely as do the world's public libraries today.
Throughout the school day, students and teachers in elementary and secondary school need school libraries to work in.

YOU CANT GO IN THIS LIBRARY UNTIL YOU'RE AN ADULT

The medical library of a hospital is a special library. So are the libraries of a law office, a weather bureau, a labor union, a museum, an arboretum, or an encyclopedia publishing firm. A special library is part of a hospital, business, or other organization, and it offers practical information to the workers or members. Such a library is not generally open to the public. Usually it concentrates on a particular subject or subjects medicine, law, climate and weather, labor, art. A special library may have few books, relying heavily instead on such materials as magazines, reports, and computer printouts. These enable the library to keep up in fast-moving fields such as aerospace.
Public, school, academic, and special libraries are the four main kinds the world over, but there are libraries that don't fit neatly into one of these groups. Research libraries are an example. Because scholars use them for study, they're much like academic libraries. Research libraries are not always attached to a college or university, however. Also, a research library often concentrates on a special subject or subjects, much like a special library. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., for instance, deals with William Shakespeare and his times.

SECRETS OF LIBRARY CODES

The secret of library codes: books are marked, or coded, in different ways. On the spine of a storybook or novel there may be such marks as a PB for picture book, an E for easy, a J for juvenile, or an F for fiction. No matter how they are marked though, such storybooks and novels are put in alphabetical order by author's last name. So Paula Fox's books come before those of Astrid Lindgren. Books by the same author are in alphabetical order by title. Lindgren's 'Seacrow Island' comes after her 'Pippi Longstocking'.

The story of someone's life may be marked with a B for biography. Such biographies are put in alphabetical order by last name of the person the book is about.

In the Dewey system, there are ten main subjects. Each subject has a three-figure number. The number 400, for instance, stands for language; 500 for science. In each Dewey number, the first figure is the key to the main subject. All books that begin with 5 are about science, and all books that begin with 4 are about language.
Each main subject is divided into ten parts. Literature (800) is divided into American literature (810), English literature (820), German literature (830), French literature (840), and so on. Each part of a subject can be divided into ten smaller parts. They, in turn, can be divided into ten still smaller parts. And that's what the decimal in the Dewey decimal classification is all about. Take 973. It includes all books on United States history. But that takes in books on the exploration of North America (973.1), the American Revolution (973.3), the Civil War (973.7), and so on. The smaller the part of a main subject, the more numbers after the decimal. Number 629.134354 stands for books about rocket engineering.

The librarian as information scientist. A librarian is a mover of ideas, of information from one mind to another. So it is not enough to know library science. A librarian must understand the bigger picture called information science, of which library science is only a part. To teach the use of a library, a librarian must understand how people think when they attack look-it-up problems. That's part of information science. To index a vertical file a librarian must understand how language works. That, too, is part of information science.

WHERE DID LIBRARIES COME FROM?
Libraries were born as collections of writings recorded on animal bones, tortoise shells, clay tablets, papyrus, silk scrolls or animal skins. Such collections go back some 4,500 to 6,000 years in Asia and Africa. Elsewhere, libraries developed much later.

FAMOUS OLD LIBRARIES

The earliest known libraries were connected with palaces and temples. In China, records of the Shang dynasty (1767?-1123? BC) were written on animal bones and tortoise shells. An early library called "The Healing Place of the Soul," in the palace of Egypt's King Ramses II (1304?-1237 BC) at Thebes, consisted of thousands of papyrus scrolls. Among the most important libraries in the ancient Near East was the palace library of Ashurbanipal (668?-627? BC) at Nineveh in Assyria. This early type of national library, collected "for the sake of distant days," consisted of over 30,000 clay tablets. Early librarians were usually priests, teachers, or scholars. The first known Chinese librarian was the philosopher Lao Tse, who was appointed keeper of the royal historical records for the Chou rulers about 550 BC.

Early types of public and academic libraries were founded in ancient Greece. Public libraries were opened in Athens perhaps as early as the 6th century BC, but they weren't lending libraries. People who could read generally studied or copied scrolls in the library. A well-known Athenian library was that of the Lyceum, a kind of college founded by the philosopher Aristotle in 335 BC. The most famous library built by the Greeks was attached to a kind of university called the Museum in Alexandria, Egypt. Scholars were encouraged to use and even borrow scrolls from the Museum Library, which had a vast collection.
A library located at Pergamum (near present-day Smyrna, Turkey) began using parchment instead of papyrus for its scrolls around 200 BC. Parchment is made from thin layers of animal skin. Another animal-skin library was an important part of a Hebrew religious community founded at Qumran, Palestine, probably early in the 1st century BC. This library contained the Dead Sea Scrolls. In China, paper was invented in about AD 100 and soon began to replace other book materials such as silk and bamboo.

Roman libraries were much like those of Greece. The most famous public library in the city of Rome was the Ulpian Library, founded in AD 114. It had separate sections for its Latin and Greek papyrus scrolls. The Romans were great builders of public libraries, establishing them throughout the Roman Empire. Perhaps the best known library was the Imperial Library, founded at Constantinople in the Eastern Roman Empire in about AD 330. It attracted scholars from all over the world to its great collection. In early Roman libraries, scrolls were kept in pigeonholes or on shelves in the walls. Gradually papyrus scrolls were replaced by parchment sheets, folded and sewn in book form. These were kept in book chests.
None of the great libraries of ancient times survived. Some were destroyed in fires, some by volcanoes, others in wars and invasions. Many libraries simply died of neglect.

CREATING GREAT LIBRARIES

Great libraries take shape. You can help to shape your classroom library into a GREAT library! Get Involved! Take Action! Get the other kids to help donate books and organize them so you can find what you want when you need it! From the 1200s on, some of today's great academic libraries began to take shape in Europe. France's University of Paris had a library by about 1250, when Robert de Sorbon gave them a collection of books. In England libraries were established at Pembroke College, Cambridge University in 1347 and at Merton College, Oxford University in 1377.

The University of Prague (now Charles University) started a library in 1348, which eventually became the core of the national library of Czechoslovakia. In 1365 the University of Vienna began its library. The oldest library in Poland, that of the University of Krakow, dates from before 1400, as does the University of Coimbra library in Portugal. Other early universities that had some sort of library by the 1400s included those at Bologna and Florence in Italy, Salamanca in Spain, Heidelberg and Cologne in Germany, Basel in Switzerland, and Copenhagen in Denmark.

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT~ THEY ACTUALLY HAD TO PAY TO USE THE LIBRARY!

Rental and subscription libraries charged fees for the use of books. Rental libraries in bookshops or peddlers' packs, on boats or carts or wagons were known in many parts of the world. For small fees, people could read books they couldn't afford to buy everything from religious books to joke books.
Subscription libraries were formed by groups of readers, usually well-to-do. These people paid dues that were used to buy books, rent a reading room, and perhaps hire a keeper of the books. In return for dues paid, members could use the reading room and borrow books from the collection. Perhaps the earliest subscription library was the Library Company of Philadelphia, Pa., founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. Canada's first such library, established in Quebec in 1780 by Governor Frederick Haldemand, stocked books in both French and English. The National Library of Singapore began as a subscription library. Subscription libraries went by many names atheneums, lyceums, and others. The social libraries of the 1700s were a type of subscription library.
Mercantile libraries and mechanics' institutes, for office and shop workers, also charged small fees. They began as self-improvement libraries. One of the first mechanics' institutes was the Birmingham Artisans' Library in England (1795). Early mechanics' institutes were opened in the United States at Bristol, Conn. (1818), and in Canada at St. John's, Newfoundland (1827). A mechanics' institute in Toronto, Ont., later became the Toronto Public Library, and the Auckland Public Library in New Zealand owes its origin to an early mechanics' institute founded there. An early mercantile library was the Mercantile library in Philadelphia (1821).

THE BIGGEST LIBRARY IN THE UNITED STATES

The Library of Congress in the United States started in 1800 when the government moved to the new city of Washington, D.C.

THE MAN OF STEEL WAS ALSO A MAN OF
THE MIND: 2,500 LIBRARIES!

In 1890 an American millionaire, Andrew Carnegie, offered a public library to Allegheny City (now part of Pittsburgh, Pa.), where many of the steelworkers that worked for him lived. It was the first of more than 2,500 public libraries he was to build in the United States and Canada.

SOME PEOPLES GRANDPARENTS WERE FORBIDDEN TO
USE PUBLIC LIBRARIES BECAUSE OF THEIR COLOR
ONLY 50 YEARS AGO.

In many places free lending libraries open to all were not available until the 20th century. Not until 1904 did China have such a library, the first one being in Hunan Province. Malaysia's first public library, a Carnegie library, opened in Kota Bharu, Malaya, in 1938. Thailand had no public library until 1950. Black people in such places as the Congo (now Zaire) and the United States could not use all public libraries until the 1950s and 1960s. Despite blank spots and blemishes, the public library really came of age in the 1900s. Modern libraries were formed in more places, and library services were extended to all people wherever they were located.

KIDS DIDN'T EVEN HAVE THEIR OWN LIBRARY SECTION UNTIL THE 1920'S!

Beginning in the 1920s, library services for children were expanded in many places. Boys and Girls House in Toronto, Ont. (1922), was the first library building in North America specifically for young people. An outstanding example of services to youth in Latin America was the Children's Library in Sao Paulo, Brazil, founded in 1935. The International Youth Library in Munich, Germany, opened in 1949, offers services to the young and encourages the publication of juvenile literature all over the world.

LIBRARY COLLECTION ARE HUGE AND SO IS THE INFORMATION THEY DEAL WITH: WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Libraries are faced with an increasingly unmanageable quantity of information. Fortunately, the availability of sophisticated computer technology and the willingness of librarians to adopt it has helped libraries to meet the needs of users.
Participation in multitype library networks (networks composed of several kinds of libraries, such as school, special, academic, and public) has helped librarians cope with the rapid growth of information. This has resulted in coordinated collection development, resource sharing, and a more efficient reference service. Cooperation among libraries and library networks is growing rapidly in the United States. The availability and affordability of PCs and telecommunication technology have played major roles in library automation and networking. For example, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), a bibliographic and data base vendor, provides remote on-line services for thousands of libraries. Regional and state networks have been formed to provide their members such services as shared cataloging and access to materials located in other libraries. For example, in Illinois there are about 2,600 libraries belonging to 17 regional library systems, and these systems belong to ILLINET (Illinois Library and Information Network). A statewide system for material delivery, ILLINET Online, and ILLINET/OCLC are some of the services available to ILLINET members. ILLINET Online is a computerized library catalog that provides information about materials located at some 800 Illinois libraries. Anyone with a personal computer or a terminal with a modem may dial into ILLINET Online.

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Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia
Copyright (c) 1994, 1995 Compton's NewMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Wow! That is sure a lot more information about Libraries than I ever thought existed! Your local encyclopedia has even MORE information! Just think: there is… your library at home….your CLASSROOM Library…your SCHOOL library.. the COLLEGE library….the PUBLIC library...and the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS! How many of those books will you have time to read?..
Better get started making your classroom library a good one!