History | Of Libraries In The Western World Pdf

As collections grew into the hundreds of thousands, organization became critical.

Before the library, there was the archive. The earliest Western collections were not for public reading but for royal record-keeping. In the Fertile Crescent, the Sumerians stored cuneiform tablets on subjects ranging from grain rations to epic poetry (the Epic of Gilgamesh ). The library of Ebla (c. 2500 BCE) contained over 20,000 tablets, organized by subject—a rudimentary but functional classification system. history of libraries in the western world pdf

Kings and nobles also built private libraries. Charlemagne (742–814) commissioned a revision of all Latin texts. In the 14th century, the French Royal Library (later the Bibliothèque Nationale) and the library of the Dukes of Burgundy set the stage for princely collections. As collections grew into the hundreds of thousands,