Libraries Timeline

Two cuneiform tablets found at Nippur, (Mesopotamia; now Iraq) are inscribed with a list of Sumerian works of literature in no apparent order.  One has 68 titles, the other 48 works.  These represent the earliest surviving literary or library catalogues. 

Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (2001) 4. 

Olof Pedersén, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500-300 B.C. (1998), remains the most comprehensive survey of the earliest western archives and libraries that I have seen, as of February 2013. It contains numerous schematic diagrams of ancient building layouts on which it identifies the location of each library or archive found. With a few exceptions, it does not discuss or attempt to summarize the contents of any archive or library covered.

1. Pedersén's study describes 253 archives and libraries from 51 different cities, of which 125 archives and libraries date from 1500-1000 BCE and 128 to 1000-300 BCE. "Since many of the very early excavations did not properly document the find-spots of tablets, it is probable that some additional archives or libraries from this period have been unearthed. . . ." (p. 238)

2. "Most of the cities or towns where archives or libraries have been unearthed were cities of medium or major size. Only rarely has material been found in smaller towns. . . ; it is unclear whether this is due to lack of written documentation in rural areas or only a consequence of a limited number of excavations of smaller settlements.

3. "Several of the archives and libraries, expecially the larger ones, were apparently placed upon wooden shelves. Evidence of wooden shelves is proposed to exist for a limited number of official archives (Tapigga 1, Harbe1), and has been assumed elsewhere (e.g., Nineveh 2). There is, however, a lack of evidence in many sites indicating the use of wooden shelves, probably due to the perishable nature of wood and a lack of sounder achaeological methodology during the earlier excavations. Sometimes the shelves were constructed of brick or designed as niches in the walls. Such imperishable shelves have been preserved in the some libraries  (Dur-Sarrukin 1 and 2, Sippar 2). The temple library in Sippar is the oldest library in history found with literary texts still standing in their original position on the shelves" (p. 244).

4. "The largest archives and libraries consist of between 1,000 and 30,000 texts. There are at least 16, perhaps even 21, archives or libraries of such size. They represent six or eight percent of the total number of 253 archives and libraries discussed here. The largest archive is the Neo-Babylonian administrative archive from the Samas temple (Sippar 1), comprising about 30,000 texts." (pp. 244-45).

Cuneiform tablets discovered at Hattusas (Hattusa), capital of the Hittite Empire in the Bronze Age, near modern Boğazkale, Turkey, contain detailed bibliographical entries.

"Each entry begins by giving the number of tablets that made up the work being recorded, just as modern catalogues give the number of volumes in a mult-volume publication. The entry identifies the work itself by giving the title, which may take the form of citing its first line, or by giving a capsule description of the contents. Then it tells whether the table marked the end of the work or not. At times the entry includes the name of the author or authors, or adds other useful information. . . . 

"In addition to noting missing tablets, the entries now and then provide information about shelving. There is an entry, for example, which in listing a work that happens to be in two tablets notes that 'they do not stand upright'; presumably, in the part of the palace holdings represented by this catalogue, most tablets were stored on edge while these two, exceptionally, lay flat. . . . The catalogue, it would seem, was of one particular collection that, to judge from the contents, was for use by the palace clergy. It would have been an invaluable tool: any priest who needed a ritual for a given problem, instead of picking up tablet after tablet to read the colophon if there was one, or some lines of text if there was not, had only to run an eye over the entries in the catalogue. It was a limited tool; the order of the entries is more or less haphazard (alphabetization, for example, lay over a millennium and a half in the future) and they give no indication of location. But it was, no question about it, a significant step beyond the simple listing of titles of the Nippur tablets. 

"The finds at Hattusas, in short, reveal the development of procedures for organizing a collection of writings. The palace holdings were certainly extensive enough to require them; the catalogue alone, representing as we have seen, just the clergy's working library, lists well over one hundred titles. . . ." (Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World [2001] 5-8).

In an effort to collect all knowledge, Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria from 668 to 627 BCE, collected a library at Nineveh, containing, it is estimated, 20,000–30,000 clay tablets written in cuneiform script. 

"Ashurbanipal was one of the few Assyrian kings to have been trained in the scribal arts—by one Balasî , a senior royal scholar " (Robson, "The Clay Tablet Book," Eliot & Rose (eds) A Companion to the History of the Book [2007] 75).

"Recent cataloguing in the British Museum has enumerated some 3,700 scholarly tablets from Ashurbanipal's Library written in Babylonian script and Dialect — about 13 percent of the entire library. Ashurbanipal's obsession with Babylonian books did not, then, completely overwhelm indigenous production, but he did view them as highly valuable cultural capital; their forced removal to Nineveh undermined Babylonian claims to the intellectual heritage of the region and thus pretensions to political hegemony, while reinforcing Ashurbanipal's own self-image as guardian of Mesopotamian culture and power" (Robson, op. cit., 77).

The library was discovered at Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard in 1849, and is considered the earliest systematically collected library, as distinct from a government archive. It is thought that a significant portion of the library survived to the present because the clay tablets were baked in fires set during the Median sack of Nineveh in 612 CE.

"The tablets have been sorted under the following heads: History; Law; Science; Magic; Dogma; Legends: and it has been shewn (1) that there was a special functionary to take charge of them; (2) that they were arranged in series, with special precautions for keeping the tablets forming a particular series in their proper sequence; (3) that there was a general catalogue and probably a class-catalogue as well" (Clark, The Care of Books (1902) 4). 

To deter thieves, Ashurbanipal had the following curse written on many or all of his tablets. It is the earliest known book curse, and because it was also a means of identifying his property it might also be considered an early ex-libris, albeit a verbose one:

“I have transcribed upon tablets the noble products of the work of the scribe which none of the kings who have gone before me had learned, together with the wisdom of Nabu insofar as it existeth [in writing]. I have arranged them in classes, I have revised them and I have placed them in my palace, that I, even I, the ruler who knoweth the light of Ashur, the king of the gods, may read them. Whosoever shall carry off this tablet, or shall inscribe his name on it, side by side with mine own, may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger, and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land" (Drogin, Anathema! [1983] 52-53).

The surviving portion of the library includes 660 cuneiform tablets that concern medicine. These were published in facsimile for the first time by Reginald C. Thompson as Assyrian Medical Texts. From the Originals in the British Museum (1923).

Layard published an account of his discovery of the library in Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (2 vols., 1853) from which Clark, op. cit. 2 reproduced the floor-plan of Ashurbanipal's record rooms  

Menant, La Bibliothèque du Palais de Ninive (1880). 

"The increase of the book trade made it possible for private individuals to form libraries. Even if the tradition that sixth-century tyrants such as Pisistratus of Athens and Polycrates of Samos possessed large collections of books is discounted (Anthenaeus I.3A), it is clear that by the end of the fifth century private libraries existed. Aristophanes pokes fun at Euripides for drawing heavily on literary sources in composing his tragedies (Frogs 943), and his own work, being full of parody and allusion, must have depended to some extent on a personal book collection.

"There is no trace of any general library maintained at the public expense at Athens, but it is likely that official copies of plays performed at the leading festivals such as the Dionysia were kept at the theatre or in the public record office. Pseudo-Plurarch (Lives of the ten orators 841F) ascribes to the orator Lycurgus (c. 390-324 BCE) a proposal to keep official copies in this way, but the need would probably have arisen earlier. We know that after the original performance plays were revived from time to time. New copies of the text must have been needed for the actors, and if they had been obliged to obtain these by a process of transcription from private copies it would be surprising that an almost complete range of plays survived into the Hellenistic age" (Reynolds & Wilson, Texts and Transmission, 3rd ed. [1991] 5).

The library of Aristotle may be the first private library concerning which there is considerable discussion among early commentators. It is impossible to know how much of the discussion has basis in fact. Harris provides the following summary:

“Upon his [Aristotle’s] death, this library was inherited by Aristotle’s teaching successor, Theophrastus of Lesbos. . . .  Theophrastus in turn enlarged the library and later bequeathed it to his nephew Neleus [of Scepsis]. Neleus was not a successful teacher, and in his later years withdrew from the school, taking his library with him to Scepsis in Asia Minor. [at the present site of the village of Kurşuntepe, near the town of Bayramiç in Turkey.] His descendants, apparently unlettered but aware of the value of the books, saved them by burying them, according to the geographer Strabo, to keep them out of the hands of the Attalid kings of Pergamum who were building up their famous library.

“Finally, about 100 B.C., the mildewed and worm-eaten remnants of Aristotle’s library were sold to Appellicon of Teos, a minor Athenian military leader and book collector. Apellicon tried to restore the damaged volumes but only succeeded in damaging them further when he made incorrect ‘corrections’ for missing fragments of pages and otherwise edited the works. After his death, Athens was captured by the Roman general Sulla, who carried the library off to Rome, where it eventually became a part of Tyrannion’s library. Another account relates that Ptolemy II (285-246 B.C.) acquired Aristotle’s library directly from Neleus and brought it to Egypt to become a part of the great Alexandrian library. It is possible that both stories are partially correct, and it is quite probable that copies at least of Aristotle’s library reached Alexandria eventually” (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed. [1999] 40-41).

For further information see Blum, Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography, tr. by H. Wellisch (1991) 2.6."The Library of Aristotle," 53-64.

The Royal Library of Alexandria, associated with the Musaeum or Mouseion at Alexandria (Μουσεῖον τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας),  was founded under the reign of Ptolemy I Soter or Ptolemy II.

Though it was known as the largest library in the ancient world, the number of papyrus rolls preserved at the library at Alexandria is unknown. It has been speculated that at its peak the Alexandrian library may have preserved 400,000 to 700,000 papyrus rolls— the largest collection of recorded information in the ancient world.  A typical papyrus roll probably contained a text about the length of one book of Homer.

Traditionally the Alexandrian Library is thought to have been based upon the library of Aristotle. By tradition it is also believed, without concrete evidence, that the much of the collection of rolls was acquired by order of Ptolemy III, who supposedly required all visitors to Alexandria to surrender rolls in their possession. These writings were then copied by official scribes, the originals were put into the Library, and the copies were delivered to the previous owners.

The Alexandrian Library was associated with a school and a museum. Scholars at Alexandria were responsible for the editing and standardization for many earlier Greek texts. One of the best-known of these editors was Aristophanes of Byzantium, a director of the library, whose work on the text of the Iliad may be preserved in the Venetus A manuscript, but who was also known for editing authors such as Pindar and Hesiod.

Though it is known that portions of the Alexandrian Library survived for several centuries, the various accounts of the library's eventual destruction are contradictory. The Wikipedia article on the Library of Alexandria outlines four possible scenarios for its destruction:

1. Julius Caesar's fire in The Alexandrian War, in 48 BCE
2. The attack of Aurelian in the Third century CE
3. The decree of Theophilus in 391 CE
4. The Muslim conquest in 642 CE or thereafter.

The article concludes that "although the actual circumstances and timing of the physical destruction of the Library remain uncertain, it is however clear that by the eighth century A.D., the Library was no longer a significant institution and had ceased to function in any important capacity."

♦ Another factor in the eventual destruction of the contents of the Alexandrian Library might have been the decay of the papyrus rolls as a result of the climate. Most of the papyrus rolls and fragments that survived after the Alexandrian Library did so in the dry sands of the Egyptian desert. Papyrus rolls do not keep well either in dampness or in salty sea air, to which they were likely exposed in the library located in the port of Alexandria. Thus, independently of the selected library destruction scenario, because of decay of the storage medium, or as a result of fires or other natural catastrophes, or neglect, it is probable that significant portions of the information in the Alexandrian library were lost before the library was physically destroyed.

This is the date range of the Dead Sea Scrolls which were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran, on the northwestern shores of the Dead Sea. Historical, paleographic, and linguistic evidence, as well as carbon-14 dating, established that the scrolls and the Qumran ruin dated from the third century BCE to 68 CE. Dating from the late Second Temple Period, when Jesus of Nazareth lived, the Dead Sea Scrolls are older than any other surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures, except for the Nash Papyrus, by almost one thousand years. They are preserved in The Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

“Most of the scrolls were written in Hebrew, with a smaller number in Aramaic or Greek. Most of them were written on parchment, with the exception of a few written on papyrus. The vast majority of the scrolls survived as fragments—only a handful were found intact. Nevertheless, scholars have managed to reconstruct from these fragments approximately 850 different manuscripts of various lengths.

"The manuscripts fall into three major categories: biblical, apocryphal, and sectarian. The biblical manuscripts comprise some two hundred copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, representing the earliest evidence for the biblical text in the world. Among the apocryphal manuscripts (works that were not included in the Jewish biblical canon) are works that had previously been known only in translation, or that had not been known at all. The sectarian manuscripts reflect a wide variety of literary genres: biblical commentary, religious-legal writings, liturgical texts, and apocalyptic compositions. Most scholars believe that the scrolls formed the library of the sect (the Essenes?) that lived at Qumran. However it appears that the members of this sect wrote only part of the scrolls themselves, the remainder having been composed or copied elsewhere” (Shrine of the Book. Introduction to the Dead Sea Scrolls, accessed 12-24-2009).

In September 2011 The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls website, a partnership between the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and Google, made five of the scrolls searchable online as part of a project to provide searchable online facsimiles of all the scrolls.

In December 2012 the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library was launched by the Israel Antiquities Authority in partnership with Google Israel, making high resolution images of the scrolls freely available. The site was launched 11 years after the completion of the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, initiated and sponsored by the IAA, and 65 years after the first scrolls were unearthed in the Caves of Qumran.

Commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey written in the Hellenistic period at Alexandria began exploring the textual inconsistencies of the poems which occurred as the result of different scribes writing down differing versions of poems passed down through the oral tradition. This process of comparing different manuscript texts— such as would have been preserved at the Alexandrian Library— to arrive at what might be the “canonical” text, was the beginning of philology.

The first critical edition of Homer was made by Zenodotus of Ephesus, first superintendant of the Library of Alexandria, who lived during the reigns of the first two Ptolemies, and was at the height of his reputation about 280 BCE. His colleagues in librarianship were Alexander of Aetolia and Lycophron of Chalcis, to whom were allotted the tragic and comic writers respectively, Homer and other epic poets being assigned to Zenodotus.

"Having collated the different manuscripts in the library, he expunged or obelized doubtful verses, transposed or altered lines, and introduced new readings. It is probable that he was responsible for the division of the Homeric poems into twenty-four books each (using capital Greek letters for the Iliad, and lower-case for the Odyssey), and possibly was the author of the calculation of the days of the Iliad in the Tabula Iliaca" (Wikipedia article on Zenodotus, accessed 11-26-2008).

The Temple of Edfu dedicated to the falcon god Horus, located on the west bank of the Nile in the city of Edfu, which was known in Greco-Roman times as Apollonopolis Magna after the chief god Horus-Apollo, was built in the Ptolemaic period between 237 and 57 BCE. Inscriptions on its walls provide information on language, myth and religion during the Greco-Roman period in ancient Egypt. 

In this temple "there is a small room near the court which was used as an archive. The walls show inscriptions concerning 'many chests of books and large leather rolls.' They included all the literature appertaining to a temple; liturgy for daily rites and feast days; manuscripts containing the building plans and instructions for the decorations on the walls of the temple; incantations and priestly lore but also documents relevant to the administration" (Hussein 21).

"Because of the great quantity of extant papyrus rolls, which nevertheless form only a fraction of these existing in ancient times, the question arises as to how and where the Egyptians collected and arranged their books. The texts indicate that papyri were kept because we read that copying was necessary when the original had become worm-eaten. Two institutions could have served as depositories: the 'mansion of books' and the 'mansion of life'. 'Mansion of books' was the designation both for the archives where books were kept and an adminstrative office. . . .The 'mansion of life' was more than a library—it was a kind of university. Here books of all kinds were not only collected and classified, they were also written and handed down to the younger generation. It was the place where all branches of knowledge were cultivated and taught. The term 'mansion of life' also indicated that its prupose was primarily the custodianship of religious texts and the celebration of rites connected with the preservation of the king's life and that of Osiris.

"We are not able to say according to which principles libraries in the 'mansion of books' and in the 'mansion of life' were arranged. But we know. nevertheless, that the collected rolls were listed in catalogues, according to their content, and kept in chests (or other receptacles) on which a tablet with the titles of the books could be fastened or whose covers bore paintings indicating the content of the rolls" (Hussein, Origins of the Book. Egypt's contribution to the development of the book from papyrus to codex [1970] 21-22).

Following the advice of his chief adviser Li Si, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, ordered most previously existing books to be burned in order to avoid scholars' comparison of his reign with the past. Records which were allowed to escape destruction were:

"books on astrology, agriculture, medicine, divination, and the history of the Qin state. Owning the Book of Songs or the Classic of History was to be punished especially severely. According to the later Records of the Grand Historian, the following year Qin Shi Huang had some 460 scholars buried alive for owning the forbidden books. The emperor's oldest son Fusu criticised him for this act. The emperor's own library still had copies of the forbidden books, but most of these were destroyed later when Xiang Yu burned the palaces of Xianyang in 206 BCE (Wikipedia article on Qin Shi Huang, accessed 01-30-2010).

The Wikipedia article, Burning of books and burying of scholars, presents a different account, quoting the Records of the Grand Historian in footnotes, both in Chinese and English translation:

"According to the Records of the Grand Historian, after Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, unified China in 221 BCE, his chancellor Li Si suggested suppressing the freedom of speech, unifying all thoughts and political opinions. This was justified by accusations that the intelligentsia sang false praise and raised dissent through libel.

"Beginning in 213 BCE, all classic works of the Hundred Schools of Thought — except those from Li Ssu's own school of philosophy known as legalism — were subject to book burning.

"Qin Shi Huang burned the other histories out of fear that they undermined his legitimacy, and wrote his own history books. Afterwards, Li Ssu took his place in this area.

"Li Ssu proposed that all histories in the imperial archives except those written by the Qin historians be burned; that the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of History, and works by scholars of different schools be handed in to the local authorities for burning; that anyone discussing these two particular books be executed; that those using ancient examples to satirize contemporary politics be put to death, along with their families; that authorities who failed to report cases that came to their attention were equally guilty; and that those who had not burned the listed books within 30 days of the decree were to be banished to the north as convicts working on building the Great Wall. The only books to be spared in the destruction were books on medicine, agriculture and prophecy.   

"After being deceived by two alchemists while seeking prolonged life, Qin Shi Huang ordered more than 460 alchemists in the capital to be buried alive in the second year of the proscription, though an account given by Wei Hong in the 2nd century added another 700 to the figure. As some of them were also Confucius scholars Fusu counselled that, with the country newly unified, and enemies still not pacified, such a harsh measure imposed on those who respect Confucius would cause instability. However, he was unable to change his father's mind, and instead was sent to guard the frontier in a de facto exile.

"The quick fall of the Qin Dynasty was attributed to this proscription. Confucianism was revived in the Han Dynasty that followed, and became the official ideology of the Chinese imperial state. Many of the other schools had disappeared" (Wikipedia article on Burning of books and burying of scholars, accessed 01-30-2010).

Kallimachos (Callimachus), a renowned poet and head of the Alexandrian Library, compiled a catalogue of its holdings which he called Pinakes (Tables or Lists). 

Supposedly extending to 120 papyrus rolls, this catalogue amounted to a systematic survey of Greek literature up to its time. It also represented the origins of bibliography. Only a few fragments survived the eventual destruction of the library, together with a scattering of references to it in other ancient works.

Callimachus’s bibliographical methods would not be out of place in a modern library; an analysis of the eight remaining fragments of the Pinakes shows that Callimachus

"1. divided the authors into classes and within these classes if necessary into subdivisions;

"2. arranged the authors in the classes or subdivisions alphabetically;

"3. added to the name of each author (if possible) biographical data;

"4. listed under an author’s name the titles of his works, combining works of the same kind to groups (no more than that can be deduced from the eight citations); and

"5. cited the opening words of each work as well as

"6. its extent, i.e., the number of lines" (Blum, p. 152).

"The Pinakes were neither an inventory nor an exhaustive catalog of the works in the library: they did not list all the copies of a work that the library owned and did not give an indication of how to locate a book in the library—actual access would have required consulting the librarian. The Pinakes built on preexisting practices of list making (including Aristotle's pinakes of poets), sorting (such as Theophrastus' doxographies sorted topically and chronologically), and alphabetizing, the principles of which were likely already understood although they had never been put to such extensive use before" (Blair, Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age [201] 17).

The surviving fragments of Kallimachos's Pinakes were first published in print in Hymni, epigrammata et fragmenta, edited by Theodor (Theodorus) J. G. F. Graevius et al. (2 vols, Utrecht, 1697). That edition included the first edition of the monumental 758-page commentary by Ezechiel Spanheim, and also incorporated the 420 fragments collected and elucidated by the English theologian, classical scholar and critic Richard Bentley, whose reading of these fragments represents “the earliest example of a really critical method applied to such a work" (Dictionary of National Biography). ". . . many even of his boldest conjectures have been completely confirmed by the papyri" (Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship 1300-1850, 154.) Among the other commentaries and notes assembled in Graevius's edition are those by Henri Estienne, Nichodemus Frischlin, Bonaventura Vulcanius, and Anne Dacier.

♦ Apart from his contributions to bibliography, Kallimachos is known in the history of books for his quip in Fragments (ed. Pfeiffer) 465 that a "big book is a big evil" (μεγα βιβλιον μεγα κακων), a statement that he made in defense of the short lyric and elegiac poems he wrote and favored over longer epic poems. This has also been translated as "A great book is a great evil."

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography. Its History and Development (1984) no. 1.  Blum, Kallimachos. The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography. Translated by Hans H. Wellisch (1991).

Evidence suggests that the process of canonization of the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) occurred over several centuries, probably between 200 BCE and 200 CE.

"Rabbinic Judaism recognizes the twenty-four books of the Masoretic Text, commonly called the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. Evidence suggests that the process of canonization occurred between 200 BC and AD 200. A popular position is that the Torah was canonized circa 400 BC, the Prophets circa 200 BC, and the Writings circa AD 100  perhaps at a hypothetical Council of Jamnia—this position, however, is increasingly criticised by modern scholars. The book of Deuteronomy includes a prohibition against adding or subtracting (4:2, 12:32) which might apply to the book itself (i.e. a "closed book," a prohibition against future scribal editing) or to the instruction received by Moses on Mt. Sinai. The book of 2 Maccabees, itself not a part of the Jewish canon, describes Nehemiah (around 400 BC) as having "founded a library and collected books about the kings and prophets, and the writings of David, and letters of kings about votive offerings" (2:13-15). The Book of Nehemiah suggests that the priest-scribe Ezra brought the Torah back from Babylon to Jerusalem and the Second Temple (8-9) around the same time period. Both I and II Maccabees suggest that Judas Maccabeus (around 167 BC) likewise collected sacred books (3:42-50, 2:13-15, 15:6-9), indeed some scholars argue that the Jewish canon was fixed by the Hasmonean dynasty. However, these primary sources do not suggest that the canon was at that time closed; moreover, it is not clear that these particular books were identical in content to those that later became part of the Masoretic text. Today, there is no scholarly consensus as to when the Jewish canon was set" (Wikipedia article on Development of the Jewish Bible Canon, accessed 12-24-2009).

Rulers of Pergamum (Pergamon; now Bergama in Turkey) founded a major library. Whether this was in competition with the Alexandrian Library, or just a worthy independent effort, remains the subject of historical speculation.

This project, and the vast buildings constructed for the purpose, is associated with the rule of king Eumenes II. The Library of Pergamum supposedly contained 200,000 rolls— the second largest library in the ancient world.

"Legend has it that Mark Antony later gave Cleopatra all of the 200,000 volumes at Pergamum for the Library at Alexandria as a wedding present, emptying the shelves and ending the dominance of the Library at Pergamum. No index or catalog of the holdings at Pergamum exists today, making it impossible to know the true size or scope of this collection.

"Historical accounts claim that the library possessed a large main reading room, lined with many shelves. An empty space was left between the outer walls and the shelves to allow for air circulation. This was intended to prevent the library from becoming overly humid in the warm climate of Anatolia and can be seen as an early attempt at library preservation. Manuscripts were written on parchment, rolled, and then stored on these shelves. A statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, stood in the main reading room" (Wikipedia article on Library of Pergamum, accessed 12-24-2009).

♦ Pergamum is sometimes associated with the invention of parchment (charta pergamena). However, writing on prepared animal skins had a long history. Some Egyptian Fourth Dynasty texts were written on parchment. Though the Assyrians and the Babylonians inscribed their cuneiform on clay tablets, they also wrote on parchment from the 6th century BCE onward, and Jews wrote on parchment rolls. It has been argued that the Pergamene authorities were forced to fall back on parchment when supplies of papyrus from Egypt were interrupted during the invasions of Egypt by Antiochus IV Epihanes. During this period scholars from Pergamum may have introduced parchment to Rome where the shortage of papyrus would have had an even greater impact. It has also been conjectured that the Pergamenes may have discovered that "by simplifying the composition of the pelt preparation bath, allied with a special mode of drying wet unhaired pelts (by stretching them as much as possible) smooth taut sheets of uniform opacity could easily be obtained" (Roberts & Skeat, The Birth of the Codex [1983] 9).

Clark, The Care of Books (1901) 9 reproduces a plan of the "temple and precinct of Athena, Pergamon; with that of the Library and adjacent buildings."

The Seven Epitomes is thought to have been compiled by the Chinese astronomer, historian and editor Liu Xin (Liu Hsin) during the Xin Dynasty. A by-product of a collation project commissioned by the Emperor Ch'eng Ti of the Han Dynasty, it was the catalogue of all collated books housed in the libraries of the Inner Court at the time, initiated under the supervision of Liu Xiang (Liu Hsiang). These had been recovered after the burning of the books under the rule of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang in 213-206 BCE.

Although the original classification system no longer survives, Chinese bibliographers believe that the majority of its entries, in a much abridged form, and its original classification structure, have been preserved in the “Bibliographic Treatise” of the History of the [Former] Han Dynasty (Han shu “yi wen zhi”, compiled about a hundred years later. Scholars estimate that there were more than six hundred annotated entries in the Seven Epitomes arranged according to a carefully designed classification system. The title of the catalogue seems to suggest that the system consisted of seven epitomes (classes). However, the “Treatise” included only six classes (without “Ji lüe” or the Collective Epitome). Since the Seven Epitomes is no longer extant, scholars have not been able to reach a consensus regarding the nature and content of Ji lüe. One speculation that has been widely accepted is that Ji lüe was the collection of brief summaries now seen at the end of each of the six main classes and their divisions. Nevertheless, no one disputes that the classification in the Seven Epitomes was a six-fold scheme.

"There are six classes and divisions in the Seven Epitomes:

"1. Liu yi lüe (Epitome of the Six Arts) consisted of nine divisions, including one for each of the Six Classics (Odes, Documents, Rites, Music, Changes, and Spring and Autumn Annals), Analects of Confucius, Book of Filial Piety, and philology.

"2. Zhu zi lüe (Epitome of the Masters) consisted of ten divisions, including nine major affi liations of thought commonly known during the Warring States and an added affi liation of Novelists. "

3. Shi fu lüe (Epitome of Lyrics and Rhapsodies) consisted of fi ve divisions, including three styles of poetry and two other genres. "

4. Bing shu lüe (Epitome of Military Texts) consisted of four divisions (tactics, terrain, yin/yang, and military skills).

"5. Shu shu lüe (Epitome of Numbers and Divination) consisted of six divisions, including astronomy, chronology, fi ve phases correlative elements, divination, miscellaneous fortune-telling, and geomancy).

"6. Fang ji lüe (Epitome of Formulae and Techniques) consisted of four divisions, including medical classics, pharmacology, sexology, and longevity"  (Hurl-Li Lee, "Origins of the Main Classes in the First Chinese Bibliographic Classification" https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/hurli/www/Chinese/Lee_ISKO2008.pdf, accessed 01-11-2011).

Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, "A History of Bibliographic Classification in China," The Library Quarterly XXII (1952)  307-324.

Julius Caesar introduced the Julian calendar.

The Julian Calendar has a regular year of 365 days divided into 12 months, and a leap day is added every four years, so the average Julian year is 365.25 days. The calendar remained in use into the 20th century in some countries and is still used by many national Orthodox churches. "However with this scheme too many leap days are added with respect to the astronomical seasons, which on average occur earlier in the calendar by about 11 minutes per year, causing it to gain a day about every 128 years. It is said that Caesar was aware of the discrepancy, but felt it was of little importance."

Caesar planned to establish a public library to equal or surpass the one at Alexandria. He appointed Marcus Terentius Varro, a noted scholar and book collector, to gather copies of the best-known literature for a Roman public library. However these plans were shelved when Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE.

Gaius Asinius Pollio, general, lawyer, orator, poet, friend of Virgil and Horace, and Consul 40 BCE, having amassed a fortune in his conquest of Dalmatia and/or campaigns in Parthia, consolidated several book collections already in Rome, possibly including those of Varro and Sulla, to form a library in the Temple of Liberty (Atrium Libertatis) on the Aventine Hill.

The library had Greek and Latin wings. "Public archives had already been housed there, but Pollio reorganized the collection, added the libraries he had acquired, and opened the whole to the public about 37 B.C., making it the first-known public library in Rome” (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed. [1999] 57.)

Clark, The Care of Books (1902) p. 12 quote's Pliny's remark about Asinius Pollio: "he was the first to make men's talents public property (ingenia hominium rem publicam fecit)."

"By the end of the Roman Republic the institutions and processes that govern and guard the transmission of the written word were already in existence, and under Augustus and his successors they were refined and consolidated. The book trade became more important, and we soon hear of the names of established booksellers: Horace speaks of the Sosii, later Quintilian and Martial tell of the Tryphon, Atrectus, and others. By the time of the Younger Seneca book collecting was derided as a form of extravagant ostentation. Augustus founded two public libraries, one in 28 B.C. in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, the other, not long afterwards, in the Porticus Octaviae. Thereafter libraries were a common form of both private and imperial munificence, in Rome and the provinces. Pliny founded a library in his native Comum and provided money for its upkeep; the best-preserved (and restored) ancient library is that built at Ephesus in memory of Titus Julius Celsus, proconsul of Asia A.D. 106-7; one of the most famous was the Bibliotheca Ulpia founded by Trajan, which long survived the disasters of fire and strife and was still standing in the fifth century" (Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd. ed. [1991] 24-25).

“Beginning with Augustus, the Roman emperors took over the task of building libraries in Rome. Actually, Augustus was responsible for two public libraries. The first, in the Temple of Apollo, was begun in 36 B.C. and dedicated in 28. B.C. It was divided into two separate collections, one Greek and one Latin. Pompeius Macer was the first librarian, and Julius Hyginus, a noted grammarian, also served in that capacity. Later enlarged by the Emperors Tiberius and Caligula, this library on the Palatine Hill was one of the two major libraries in Rome for several hundred years. It was damaged at least twice by fires but survived well into the 4th century. The second Augustan library was in the Porticus Octaviae, a magnificent structure built in honor of Octavia, the Emperor’s sister. . . . Caius Melissus was the first librarian for this collection, housed in chambers over a promenade. Although damaged by fire in the reign of Titus about 80 A.D., the Octavian Library probably surived into the 2nd century“ (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed. [1999] 57.)

Clark, The Care of Books (1901) reproduces a plan of the Porticus Octaviae on p. 13. 

Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca, or Seneca the Younger) denounced book collectors, and even denounced the Royal Library of Alexandria:

"Outlay upon studies, best of all outlays, is reasonable so long only as it is kept within certain limits. What is the use of books and libraries innumerable, if scarce in a lifetime the master reads the titles? A student is burdened by a crowd of authors, not instructed; and it is far better to devote yourself to a few, than to lose your way among a multitude.

"Forty thousand books were burnt at Alexandria. I leave others to praise this splendid monument of royal opulence, as for example Livy, who regards it as 'a noble work of royal taste and royal thoughtfulness.' It was not taste, it was not thoughtfulness, it was learned extravagance—nay not even learned, for they had bought their books for the sake of show, not for the sake of learning—just as with many, who are ignorant even of the lowest branches of learning, books are not instruments of study, but ornaments of dining-rooms. Procure then as many books as will suffice for use; but not a single one for show. You will replay: 'Outlay on such objects is preferable to extravagance on plate or paintings.' Excess in all directions is bad. Why should you excuse a man who wishes to possess book-presses inlaid with arbor-vitae wood or ivory; who gathers together masses of authors either unknown or discredited; who yawns among his thousands of books; and who derives his chief delight from their edges and their tickets?

" You will find then in the libraries of the most arrant idlers all that orators or historians have written—book-cases built up as high as the ceiling. Nowadays a library takes rank with a bathroom as a necessary ornament of a house. I could forgive such ideas, if they were due to extravagant desire for learning. As it is, these productions of men whose genius we revere, paid for at a high price, with their portraits ranged in line above them, are got together to adorn and beautify a wall" (translated in Clark, The Care of Books [1901] 22-23). 

In 79 CE the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the Roman coastal city of Herculaneum. Among the vast ruins preserved in lava was the library of papyrus rolls in the so-called “Villa of the Papyri”— a magnificent home thought to have been built by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. This remains the only library preserved intact from Roman times.

Because the library was buried in lava, most of the papyrus rolls are too fragile to be opened. It has required sophisticated computer technology to read the few that have been read so far, and it is hoped that an X-ray CT scanning system may allow the reading of others.

". . . three of the words applied to contrivances used [by the Romans] to keep books in, namely, nidus, forulus, and loculamentum, may be rendered by the English 'pigeon-hole'; and that pegma and pluteus mean contrivances of wood which may be rendered by the English 'shelving.' It is quite clear that pegmata could be run up with great rapidity, from a very graphic account in Cicero's leters of the rearrangement of his library. He begins by writing to his friend Atticus as follows:

" 'I wish you would send me any two fellows out of your library, for Tyrannio to make use of as pasters, and assistants in other matters. Remind them to bring some vellum with them to make those titles (indices) which you Greeks, I believe call silluboi. You are not to do this it is inconvenient to you. . . .'

"In the next letter he says:

" 'Your men have made by library gay with their carpentry-work, and their titles (constructione et sullybis). I wish you would commend them.'

"When all is complete he writes:

" 'Now that Tyrannio has arranged by books, a new spirit has been infused into my house. In this matter the help of your men Dionysius and Menophilus has been invaluable. Nothing could look neater than those shelves of yours (illa tua pegmata), since they smartened up my books with their titles.'

"No other words than those I have been discussing are, so far as I know, applied by the best writers to the storage of books; and, and after a careful study of the passages in which they occur, I conclude that, so long as rolls only had to be accomdoated, private libraries in Rome were fitted with rows of shelves standing against the walls (plutei), or fixed to them (pegmata). The space between these horizontal shelves was subdivided by vertical divisions into pigeon-holes (nidi, foruli, loculamenta), and it may be conjectured that the width of these pigeon-holes would vary in accordance with the number of rolls included in a single work. That such receptacles were the common furniture of a library is proved, I think, by such evidence as the epigram of Martial quoted above, in which he tells his friend that he will accept his poems, he may 'put them even in the lowest pigeon-hole (nido vel imo),' as we would say, 'on the bottom shelf'; and by the language of Seneca when he sneers at the 'pigeon-holes (loculamenta) carried up to the ceiling.'

"The height of the woodwork varied, of course, with individual taste. In the library on the Esquiline the height was only three feet six inches; at Herculaneum about six feet. 

"I can find no hint of any doors, or curtains, in front of the pigeon-holes. That the ends of the rolls (frontes) were visible, is, I think, quite clear from what Cicero says of his own library after the construction of the shelves (pegmata); and the various devices for making rolls attractive seem to me to prove that they were intended to be seen.

"A representation of rolls arranged on the system which I have attempted to describe occurs on a piece of sculpture (fig. 11) found at Neumagen, near Trèves [Neumagen-Dhron] in the seventeenth century, among the ruins of a fortified camp attributed to Constantine the Great. Two divisions, full of rolls, are shewn, into one of which a man, presumably the librarian, is replacing one. The ends of the rolls are furnished with tickets" (Clark, The Care of Books [1901] 35-37.)

After the Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum (Pergamon), the Bibliotheca Ulpia, or the Ulpian Library, was the most famous library of antiquity and, of all the Roman libraries, the only one to survive at least until the fall of Rome in the mid-fifth century. It was founded by the Emperor Trajan in his Forum.

♦ You can view a computer reconstruction of the interior of the Ulpian Library at this link.

"This collection may have been based on the 30,000-volume private library of Epaphrodites [Epaphroditus] of Cheronea, and like other Roman libraries, it was divided into Greek and Latin sections. Early in the 4th century, this library was moved to the Baths of Diocletian. . . .This move was apparently only temporary, possibly while the Forum was being repaired, since the library is reported to have been returned at a later date. Trajan’s library was still in existence in 455 A.D. when a bust of Didonius Apollinarius was placed there by the Emperor Avitus” (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed. [1999] 58.)

After his arrival in Caesaria, Palestine, from Alexandria in 234 Christian scholar and theologian Origen (Ὠριγένης Ōrigénēs or Origen Adamantius) undertook compilation of the Hexapla, an elaborate tool for textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible containing the Old Testament written in six parallel columns laid out across each page opening in a series of large, thick codices. The project is thought to have taken roughly 20 years to complete, by Origen with a team of assistants and scribes, some of whom may have been slaves. To undertake his scholarly work Origen collected a very significant library, though we have little understanding of its precise contents. 

Origen was the first Christian biblical scholar, and the first Christian scholar to undertake the study of Hebrew. His Hexapla was not only a massive scholarly achievement in the early days of Christianity, but also a landmark in book history, since the Hexapla was undoubtedly the largest scholarly endeavor in the early history of Christianity—a work so large in terms of sheer information quantity that it could only have been written in a series of large codices, the format of the book that was gradually replacing the papyrus roll between 100 and 400 CE. In papyrus roll form the Hexapla would have occupied hundreds of rolls, and would have been virtually impossible to use, a consideration which would assure that the codex format was employed. The volumes of the Hexapla were also presumably the first codices to display information in tabular form– a form that Origen appears to have invented.

It is estimated that the original Hexapla consisted of about 6000 folio pages in perhaps 40 codices, and that because of the immense cost of its production- perhaps 150,000 denarii based on Diocletian's price edict- it probably existed in only a single complete copy. This copy may have been preserved in the library of the bishops of Caesarea for several centuries, but was lost in the Muslim invasion of in 638, if not earlier.  The format of the large codices of the Hexapla is thought to be have been influential on the design of the other large codex produced about a century later which did survive— the Codex Sinaiticus. It is, of course, also likely that the Hexapla was used in editing the Bible text recorded in the Codex Sinaiticus. Origen's table format was also influential on the development of Eusebius's table format in his Chronicon.

Because so little physical evidence survived from the transitional period from the papyrus roll to the codex during first four centuries CE, the details that we have of Origen's Hexapla and its relationship to Eusebius's Chronicon and to the Codex Sinaiticus are significant markers for this critical early period in book history. Only a few small fragments of codices have survived from the third century, and nothing from that date confirms the tabular form of the Hexapla, or even that it was written in codex form. For confirmation of the layout of the codex page openings of the Hexapla we depend upon later evidence: two early manuscript fragments that survived. The first is a palimpsest from the Cairo Genizah in which the 8th century text of a portion of the Psalms in the columnar form of the Hexapla was overwritten in Hebrew. This is reproduced on p. 97 of Grafton & Williams. On p. 99 the same authors reproduce a diagram showing the layout of the partial Hexapla leaf showing its actual linear and columnar arrangement in white and a hypothetical reconstruction of the original folio page opening in six columns in gray. The other fragment, coincidentally also of the Psalms, preserved in the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana in Milan, was written in Greek minuscule circa 900 and palimpsested with a 13th or 14th century Greek text.

For further support of the written format of the Hexapla we depend upon the account of Jerome:

"Our best ancient evidence for the form and content of the Hexapla comes from Jerome, writing in Palestine at the end of the fourth century. Jerome knew the work well. Not only did he possess Hexaplatic volumes of his own, which he used extensively in his translations and commentaries, but he also consulted the original at Caesarea. In a brief aside in commentary on the pseudo-Pauline letter to Titus, he gives a detailed account of the work. Jerome says that in the original Hexapla preserved at Caesarea,

"the very Hebrew words, too, are copied in their own letters, and expressed in Greek letters in the neighboring column. Aquila also, and Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodion hold their places. But for not a few books, and especially those which among the Hebrews are composed in verse, three other editions have been added, which are called the fifth, sixth, and seventh translations; they are considered authoritative though the names of the translators are lost." 

"Jerome thus confirms the presence of a Hebrew column in Hebrew letters as well as a column in Greek transliteration, which gives an unambiguous description of the order of the columns" (Grafton & Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book. Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea [2006] 91).

Study of surviving fragments of Origen's Hexapla continued over the centuries. The first edition considered comprehensive was Bernard de Montfaucon's Hexaplorum Origenis quae supersunt (2 vols., 1713). This was superceded by the edition of Frederick Field (1875). The fragments are now being re-published, with additional materials discovered since Field's edition, by an international group of Septuagint scholars. This work is being carried out as The Hexapla Project under the auspices of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. 

"According to Eusebius [Historia ecclesiastica], Origen was a confessor during the Decian persecution. Eduard Schwartz supposes that Origen's library was damaged at this time, although there is no direct evidence of it. Probably Schwartz made his conjecture because it helps to explain why Pamphilus later had to expend great effort to acquire copies of Origen's works for the Caesarean library. Decius required that people of the Roman Empire perform sacrifice and receive certificates (libelli) of compliances with the imperial order. In 249 or 250 Origen was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, but he evidently survived the persecution. It seems, then that either his case was dismissed or, what is probably more likely, he simply outlived the persecution and was freed in 251. Because Origen's judge had the power to coerce Origen's compliance by imprisonment, torture, and the assessment of fines, even to the extent of confiscation of his personal property, it is possible that his library was damaged, though certainly it was not destroyed, since, for example, the Hexapla survived until at least Jerome's day. Indeed, despite the persecution, as well as whatever other misfortunes may have befallen the library after Origen's death, Pamphilus was probably drawn to settle at Caesarea because of the reputation the city enjoyed as the home of Origen's library.

"Origen died soon after the end of the persecution, between 251 and 253, at Tyre, according to Tradition. Origen's bishop, Theoctistus, survived for almost another decade, through the persecution under Valerian to the restoration of peace by Gallienus in 260. Domnus succeeded him for a short time and was himself then succeeded by Theotecnus, whom Eusebius calls a contemporary. Theotecnus' access is according dated to sometime after 260. Eusebius also relates that Theotecnus had been a member of Origen's school (διατρβπ), presumably at Caesarea. Because of this association with Origen, it is possible that Origen's library now came, if it was not already, under direct episcopal authority" (Carriker, The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea [2003] 11-12. Note that I left out numerous textual citations by Carriker and his many footnotes. The links are, of course, my additions.)

Pamphilus of Caesarea (Pamphilius), presbyter, and teacher of Eusebius, devoted his life to searching out and obtaining copies of manuscript texts, some of which he copied himself. He established a library that may have contained 30,000 manuscripts, and a scriptorium at a Christian theological school at Caesarea Palaestina (now Caesarea Maritima), a town on the coast of Israel between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Because of this library Caesarea was the capital of Christian scholarship in the 3rd century.

"This Pamphilus was of a noble family in the Phoenician city of Berytus Beirut], where he received his early education. Probably in the early and mid-280's, he studied in Alexandria under the presbyter Pierius, who was himself known as 'the Younger Origien.' From there Pamphilius seems to have come to Caesarea, where his great learning in philosophy and theology enabled him to open a successful school at Caesarea. Pamphilus' school could boast no unbroken descent from Origen's school, because there was no continuous sucessionof masters at Caesarea between Origen and Pamphilus. . . ." (Carriker, The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea [2003] 12-13).

During the Diocletianic persecution, the last and most bloody persecution of Christians before Constantine established Christianity as the Roman state religion, Pamphilus was arrested and imprisoned in November 307. He was executed and martyred on February 16, 309. 

"By the end of 307 Pamphilius was arrested under the orders of Urbanus, the local Roman governor, tortured cruelly, and placed in prison. Yet, in prison and suffering from his torture wounds, Pamphilius did not remain idle but continued editing the Septuagint and with Eusebius, wrote a Defense of Origen that he sent to the confessors in the mines of Phaeno, Egypt [i.e. South Palestine, "in a mining area lying east of the Wadi Arabah, between the south end of the Dead Sea and Petra."]

"After being in prison for two years, Pamphilius was ordered killed by the new governor, Firminius. He was then beheaded on February 16, 309 with several of his disciples. In his memory Eusebius called himself Eusebius Pamphili, to denote his close friendship with Pamphilius" (Orthodox Wiki article on Pamphilius, accessed 02-02-2013).

So few codices and papyrus rolls have survived from the third and fourth centuries—the period of transition from the roll to the codex— that we know remarkably little about the specific contents of any public and private libraries from the time. One exception is the Library of the bishop and historian Eusebius of Caesarea (Eusebius Pamphili). No catalogue of his library survived, but since Eusebius referenced so many specific sources in his voluminous writings, it was possible to work backwards from those references to reconstruct at least part of the library that Eusebius used.  This was done by Andrew James Carriker in The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea (2003).

"Despite Jerome's reference to this library as the bibliotheca Origenis et Pamphili, the two men who endowed it with its greatest bibliographic wealth, the modern investigation of the library at Caesarea must focus on the library in the possession of Eusebius, Pamphilus' pupil, for Eusebius furnishes the most evidence of its contents in his voluminuous extant writings. Four of these works contain the most important evidence and have according been given the most attention: the Chronicon for historical works; the Historia Ecclesiastica (HE) for Jewish and Christian works; the Praeparatio Evangelica (PE) for Jewish and Christian works; and the Vita Constantini (VC) for contemporary documents. The primary work of this book is thus to reconstruct the contents of the library from the quotations and references in these four works. Some of the difficulties of this task, most notably the problem of establishing whether Eusebius used his sources firsthand or through intermediaries, are treated in chapter two." (Carriker xiii-xiv).

Perhaps because Eusebius's writings remained central to the early history of Christianity, his writings remained in circulation through the Middle Ages up to the present, and have generated many editions and commentaries, beginning soon after Eusebius's death. Working through the primary sources and the main commentaries, Carriker was able to produce on pp. 299-311 of his very extensively footnoted study, a list of 288 or more specific works that Eusebius owned or used in the fields of Philosophy, Poetry, Oratory, History, Jewish Literature, and  Christianity. Carriker believed that the actual number of books in Eusebius's library would have been larger, perhaps 400.

The Emperor Diocletian establishes an Imperial Library at Nicomedia, the eastern capital city of the Roman Empire, but little information about this has survived.

"At the time of the conversion to Christianity, Rome had twenty-eight libraries within its walls and book production was so well established a line of business that Diocletian, in his price edict [Edict on Maximum Prices (also known as the Edict on Prices or the Edict of Diocletian; in Latin Edictum De Pretiis Rerum Venalium)] set rates for various qualities of script: for one hundred lines in 'scriptura optima', twenty-five denarii; for somewhat lesser script, twenty denarii, and for functional script ('scriptura libelii bel tabularum'), ten denarii. The unit of valuation was the normal length of line in a verse of Virgil [Vergil]. The extent of a work is given in these units at the end of some manuscripts (stichometry), and stichometric lists survive for biblical books and for the writings of Cyprian" (Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages [1990] 182).

Laufer, Diokletians Preisedikt (1971).

St. Pachomius (Pakhom, Pachome and Pakhomius, Παχώμιος), a farmer once press-ganged into the army of Constantine, founded community or cenobitic organization, linking the cells of male or female hermits into monastic settlements in Upper Egypt. Beginning at Tabennisi (Tabenna,Tabennae) in the Thebaid, these monastics lived together and had their possessions in common under the leadership of an abbot or abbess, following an established rule, which included directions for the operation of a monastic library:

"that the books of the House are to be kept in a cupboard (fenestra) in the thickness of the wall. Any brother who wanted a book might have one for a week, at the end of which he was bound to return it. No brother might leave a book open when he went to church to meals. In the evening the officer called 'the Second,' that is, the second in command, was to take charge of the books, count them, and lock them up" (Clark, The Care of Books [1902] 54-55).

"He [Pachomius] established his first monastery between 318 and 323. The first to join him was his elder brother John, and soon more than 100 monks lived at his monastery. He came to found nine monasteries in his lifetime, and after 336, Pachomius spent most of his time at his Pabau monastery. From his initial monastery, demand quickly grew and, by the time of his death in 346, one count estimates there were 3000 monasteries dotting Egypt from north to south. Within a generation after his death, this number grew to 7000 and then moved out of Egypt into Palestine and the Judea Desert, Syria, North Africa and eventually Western Europe. Other sources maintain that the number of monks, rather than the number of monasteries, may have reached 7000" (Wikipedia article on Pachomius, accessed 11-28-2010).

The Codex Vaticanus, a 4th century uncial manuscript in Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament, is one of the two extant 4th century manuscripts of the Old and New Testament in the form used by the early Christians, the other being the Codex Sinaiticus. Some experts estimate the date of the Codex Vaticanus as slightly prior to the Codex Sinaiticus. The Codex Vaticanus was written on sheets of parchment in a three-column format in Biblical majuscule in scriptio continua, without word division, punctuation or pagination, by two or three different scribes.  Quires are numbered in the margin. Its page format is considerably smaller than the Codex Sinaiticus, with its pages currently measuring 27 x 27 cm. Its place of origin is uncertain; Rome, southern Italy, Alexandria, and Caesarea have been proposed.

Originally the manuscript must have been composed of 820 parchment leaves, but it appears that 71 leaves have been lost. Currently, the Old Testament consists of 617 sheets and the New Testament of 142 sheets. Pages 1519-1536 containing Hebrews 9:14 through Revelation, were lost and replaced by a 15th century minuscule supplement.

"The manuscript is believed to have been housed in Caesarea in the 6th century, together with the Codex Sinaiticus (the same unique divisions of chapters in the Acts). It came to Italy – probably from Constantinople – after the Council of Florence (1438–1445)" (Wikipedia article on Codex Vaticanus, accessed 12-05-2010).

During the 10th or 11th century the fading ink of the codex was written over, so that the original characters are obscured.

The manuscript has been housed in the Vatican Library for as long as it has been known, appearing in the Vatican Library's earliest catalogue in 1475.

The Codex Sinaiticus (formerly known as the Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus) was written in Koine Greek in the mid-4th century, by at least three scribes. The codex was written in Biblical majuscule in scriptio continua, without word division, punctuation or pagination; it incorporates two ancient methods for numbering its quires, and it also incorporates a version of the system of numbering the paragraphs of the Gospels developed by Eusebius of Caesarea.  It was written in a four-column format except for the poetical and wisdom literature in which a two-column format was used. This is the only surviving biblical manuscript employing the four-column page format, and it has been suggested that this is reminiscent of the roll format rather than the codex. It is thought that the codex was written somewhere in Asia Minor, Palestine (Caesarea?) or Egypt.

The Codex Sinaiticus is unique among ancient manuscripts for the number of corrections that were made to it by ancient correctors.  In his monograph on the codex (reference below, p. 76) D. C. Parker states that there may be as many as 27,000 corrections to the text. The number of corrections and the care in which they were made suggests, according to Parker, the importance that may have been given to this manuscript early in its history.

Originally the Codex Sinaiticus contained the Old Testament, according to the canon of the Greek Septuagint, including the books known in English as the Apocrypha, (but without 2 and 3 Maccabees) along with the New Testament and two other early Christian books—the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas. The complete codex originally incorporated 743 parchment leaves (1486 pages) with a page size of 43 cm. wide by 38 cm. high (16.9 x 15 inches). In size and extent this represented a quantum leap from the papyrus codices in which early Christian documents were most typically written. Most papyrus codices are thought to have contained only one of the Gospels, and the most it is thought that could have been incorporated in the largest papyrus codex would have been the Gospels and Acts.

Compared to the smaller papyrus codices, from the standpoint of book history the completion of the Codex Sinaiticus on parchment may represent an achievement comparable to Gutenberg's invention of printing by movable type more than 1000 years later. However, just over half of the original book survived, now dispersed between four institutions: St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, the British Library, Leipzig University Library, and the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. At the British Library the largest surviving portion - 347 leaves, or 694 pages - includes the whole of the New Testament.  The other institutions hold portions of the Septuagint, which also survived almost complete, plus the Epistle of Barnabas, and portions of The Shepherd of Hermas. 

After his conversion to Christianity the Emperor Constantine commissioned fifty Greek Bibles for the churches of his new capitol, Constantinople, and it is possible that the Codex Sinaiticus was among those commissioned. However, there is no evidence to substantiate this speculation.

♦ You can page through a digital facsimile of the Codex and listen to podcasts at the British Library website web at this link.

All surviving portions of the Codex have been joined in a virtual electronic edition at Codexsinaiticus.org.

♦ Please use the exact phrase keyword search under Codex Sinaiticus to locate several other entries in this database pertinent to this codex as it appears in book history over the centuries.

For a general guide to the codex see  Parker, Codex Sinaiticus. The Story of the World's Oldest Bible (2010).

"The first allusion to a papal library comes from Julius I (337-52), who directed the clergy to settle certain legal matters not in the civil courts in the scrinium sanctum in ecclesia. The use of the singular suggests a central library, whether in the Lateran or in the episcopal church. There is evidence that a little later Damasus I (366-84) rebuilt the basilica of the church of Saint Laurence (San Lorenzo in Prasina) to better house a library. A dedicatory hexameter inscription that once stood over the entrance to the basilica is preserved in a codex of the Vatican library. It reads:

archivis fateor volui nova condere tecta addere

preterea dextra laevaque columnas

quae Damasi teneant proprium per saecula nomen.

"This library, however, was probably not the central ecclesiastical library at Rome, for the Lateran Palace had been the official residence of the pope and the center of ecclesiastical administration since the time of Sylvester I (315-335), and it is more likely that the papal library, including the central archives, was located there.

"Excavations carried out at the beginning of the twentieth century in the Capella Sancta Sanctorum, the only surviving part of the ancient Lateran Palace, discovered among the foundations of the chapel the remains of a room of the earliest Lateran library. On one wall was a fresco of a reader, apparently Augustine, seated at a desk, an open codex before him. Beneath it was a legend referring to the writings of the fathers. Clearly this library contained theological literature, not merely archives. The painting dates from the fifth or early sixth century, but the room was probably a library much earlier. Although the Liber pontificales lists a series of popes, beginning with Celestine I (422-32), who contributed to the growth of the Lateran library, little is known of its scope and contents before the seventh century. The proceedings of the Lateran Council of 649 include an extensive list of books the council requested from the library in order to document the issues, a list that includes a great variety of theological texts, orthodox and heretical, deriving from both the Greek and the Latin church. If this list reflects the actual or approximate holdings of the library, it held an extensive collection of theological literature at least by the middle of the seventh century" (Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church [1999] 162-63).

The emperor Constantius II, son of Constantine I, aware of the deterioration of texts written on papyrus rolls, began the formation of the Imperial Library of Constantinople by having the Judeo-Christian scriptures copied from papyrus rolls onto the more permanent medium of parchment or vellum. The person in charge of the library under Constantius II is thought to have been Themestios, who directed a team of scribes and librarians who copied the texts of papyrus rolls onto parchment or papyrus codices. It is probable that this library preserved selected texts that survived the burning of the Library of Alexandria, though the historical accounts of the destruction of the Alexandrian Library are contradictory. It has been estimated that the Imperial Library of Constantinople eventually grew to about 100,000 manuscript volumes, presumably bookrolls and codices.

"The first indication of an imperial library in Constantinople comes from Themistius, who in an oration delivered in 357 congratulates the emperor on having undertaken to reconstitute and collect in Constantinople the literary heritage of ancient hellenism by having the works of ancient authors, including minor ones, transcribed by a cadre of professional scribes working at imperial expense (Or.4.59-61). Such a scriptorium and such a task presuppose a library, and the library, if not established by Constantius, owed its character and early development to him. Subsequently, according to Zosimus (Hist. nov. 3.11.3) the emperor Julian (361-63) lent his patronage to the library and enlarged its holdings with his own. The Theodosian code (14.9.2) informs us that in 372 the emperor Valens ordered the employment of seven copyists (antiquarii)--four for Greek and three for Latin texts--and some assistants to maintain and repair the books of the imperial library. Thus we know that the library housed both Greek and Latin texts, but not necessarily in separate libraries, as was the practice in Rome" (Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church. A History of Early Christian Texts [1995] 168).

One theory suggests that in 391 CE what remained of the Alexandrian Library was held in the Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple built by Ptolemy III and dedicated to Serapis, the syncretic Hellenistic-Egyptian god who was made the protector of Alexandria.

According to the the monk historian and theologian Tyrannius Rufinus and the historian of the Christian church Salminius Hermias Sozomenus (Σωζομενός Sozomen), Theophilus of Alexandria, Patriarch of Alexandria, discovered a hidden pagan temple. He and his followers mockingly displayed the pagan artifacts to the public which offended the pagans enough to provoke an attack on the Christians. The Christian faction counter-attacked, forcing the pagans to retreat to the Serapeum, which at that time may have housed what remained of the Alexandrian Library.  In response to this conflict the emperor sent Theophilus a letter ordering that the offending pagans be pardoned, but giving permission to destroy the temple and its pagan contents. According to church historian Socrates Scholasticus or Socrates of Constantinople, the emperor granted permission to destroy the temple in response to heavy solicitation by Theophilus.

“ 'Seizing this opportunity, Theophilus exerted himself to the utmost ... he caused the Mithraeum to be cleaned out... Then he destroyed the Serapeum... and he had the phalli of Priapus carried through the midst of the forum. ... the heathen temples... were therefore razed to the ground, and the images of their gods molten into pots and other convenient utensils for the use of the Alexandrian church'  —Socrates Scholasticus, The Ecclesiastical History" (Wikipedia article on Theophilus of Alexandria, accessed 11-28-2010).

♦ A papyrus fragment from an illustrated Greek chronicle written in Alexandria circa 450 CE has survived, depicting Theophilus standing triumphantly on top of the Serapeum, providing a near contemporary portrait of Theophilus in the context of these events. 

___________________________________________________________________

In 2009 Spanish film director Alejandro Amenábar released the historical fiction film Agora based on elements of these historical events, and the life of the female neoplatonic philosopher and mathematician Hypatia (portrayed by Rachel Weisz), who was the daughter of the last known mathematician associated with Alexandria, Theon of Alexandria (portrayed by Michael Lonsdale). In my opinion this is among the few historical films to include discussion of serious, if watered-down scientific and philosophical ideas along with all the action sequences. The drama seems relatively objective, presenting the tragedy of the deaths of Hypatia and Theon, and the loss of the Alexandrian Library against unbiased and unflattering portrayals of the conflicts between pagans and Christians, and the conflicts between Christians and Jews.

From the standpoint of book history, the film seems reasonably accurate, with the exception of two details: in one scene a Christian is shown preaching from a papyrus roll. More than likely this would have been a codex; in another scene a Christian preacher is appropriately shown with an open codex written in what resembles the correct Greek majuscule. The other probably inaccurate detail is the way that the rolls are shelved in the Serapeum. Instead of pigeon hole shelves which would probably have been historically accurate, the rolls are displayed in shelves with diagonal cross-pieces rather like those used in some wine cellars. The film was a critical success but commercial flop in the U.S.; it was financially successful in Europe, and released on DVD in 2010. 

"There is a tendency to write about ancient literature and late antique manuscripts as if they vanished, all at once, in the chaotic centuries often called the Dark Ages—to see the history of transmission in this period largely in terms of large-scale physical destruction. Such a picture is slightly out of focus. Yes, the period AD 400-600 saw a great deal of destruction; but then, destruction from fire and the elements was not new to Roman history. The exceptional element was that the production of new manuscripts ceased; the market for new books rapidly diminished and, once the market dried up, the means of production disappeared. This was not so much a result of the physical destruction of either the readers or the bookshops, but rather because the traditional audience, namely the Roman senatorial class, within a couple of centuries dwindled in size and recycled itself as an ecclesiastical class with its own, albeit small, means of producing manuscripts.

"Lack of production, of course, does not equal lack of use—in many respects, quite the opposite. The newly emerging societies cherished Roman coins, and clipped them to make the smaller denominations appropriate to their greatly reduced money economy, since they did not mint large quantities of precious metals of their own. In similar fashion, Roman books whether papyrus or parchment continued to serve the needs of the shrinking literate class—not new books, but the enormous residue of the antique book trade that reposed in public and private libraries. These slowly gravitated to ecclesiastical libraries (locus of the new literate class), to be sent north with the missionaries. Benedict Biscop, for example, had no difficulty finding books to carry north to Norhumbria when he visited Rome in the 670s; but these were old books, already a century or two older than he.

"What is remarkable is the length of time that Christian Rome and its infrastructure endured. As we have suggested, Roman civilization, centred on the city, the forum, and the public baths, which was once thought to have been destroyed by the Visigoths and Ostrogoths who sacked Rome in the course of the fifth century, is now generally recognized as having remained, though undeniably altered, reasonably intact until the middle of the sixth century; indeed, the external trapping of this civilization were gladly appropriated by the Ostrogothic kindom of Theodoric (475-527), whom both Boethius and Cassiodorus served. The physical devastation of Roman Italy occurred, ironically, through the reassertion of imperial power—the reappearance in 540 of Byzantine armies in Italy under the emperor Justinian's general Belisarius. Rome changed hands five times in these campaigns.

"What survived Belisarius' legions fell to the Lombards, the last of the tribal groups to move into Italy. Any city, such as Milan, that opposed the Lombard advance was razed; those like Verona that opened their gates survived unharmed. It is no wonder, then, that little of ancient Milan, city of Ambrose, survived—or, conversely, that Petrarch in the fourteenth century could find what was probably a late antique manuscript of Cicero's letters to Atticus in Verona. Remarkably, the Roman aqueducts still functioned in the time of Pope Gregory I (pope 590-604); but gradually the Roman ruling class was replaced or absorbed by Lombard (or, in Gaul, by Frankish) peoples who had little need, or even less ability, to maintain the physical infrastructure of Roman civilization: the forum, public baths, roads, libraries, temples. As became unnecessary, they were increasingly neglected. Eventually they served the only useful purpose left to them, becoming the quarries that provided the cut stone from which early medieval basilicas and royal palaces were built" (Rouse," The Transmission of the Texts," Jenkyns (ed) The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal [1992] 44-45).

"The twelfth-century epitomist Joannes Zonaras relays an old and possibly accurate estimate that in 475 when the [Imperial] library [of Constantinople] was damaged by fire it contained 120,000 volumes, which suggests that the library grew steadily during the first century after its founding" (Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church. A Study of Early Christian Texts [1995] 169).

About 520 CE the Codex Argenteus (silver codex) was written in silver and gold letters on purple vellum in probably in Ravenna, or in the Po valley, or in Brescia, probably for the Ostrogothic ruler of Italy, Theodoric. 

The Codex Argenteus contains fragments of the Four Gospels translated into Gothic by the fourth century Bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila), of Nicopolis ad Istrum (now Northern Bulgaria). It is the primary surviving example of the Gothic language, an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths, and set down in writing by Ulfilas who devised devised the Gothic alphabet. Of the original 336 leaves only 188 are preserved at the Carolina Rediviva library at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, plus one separate leaf, discovered, remarkably, in 1970 in the cathedral of Speyer in Germany.

During the Ostrogothic rule of Italy there was a bilateral Gothic-Latin culture, of which the Codex Brixianus, also produced in Italy at approximately the same time, survives as a Latin counterpart to the Codex Argenteus. It is believed that the Latin version of the Bible in the Codex Brixianus may be the Latin text from which Ulfilas translated the Bible into Gothic.

"With the end of Gothic rule the Gothic manuscripts in Italy were rendered valueless; what remained of them (with the exception of the Codex Argenteus) became part of that waste material which in the seventh and eighth centuries was re-used in Bobbio" (Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and Middle Ages [1990] 186).

After about a thousand years during which the Codex Argenteus appeared in no inventories, it was rediscovered in the middle of the 16th century in the library of the Benedictine monastery of Werden in the Ruhr, near Essen in Germany (Werden Abbey). This abbey, whose abbots were imperial princes with a seat in the imperial diets, was among the richest monasteries of the Holy Roman Empire. The Dutch physician, humanist, and linguist Johannes Goropius Becanus published the first mention of the manuscript in his 1569 book Origines Antwerpianae. In 1665 Franciscus Junius the Younger published the editio princeps of the text as Quatuor D. N. Jesu Christi euangeliorum versiones perantiquae duae, Gothica scil. et Anglo-Saxonica (Dordrecht, 1665).

In 1597 Bonaventura Vulcanius, professor of Greek at Leiden, published portions of the Gothic Bible text from the Codex Argenteus in a collection of treatises on the Goths which he edited for publication by the Plantin Press. In his preface to one of these treatises, De literis et lingua Getarum sive Gothorum, Vulcanius wrote that it represented two brief disserations by an unidentifiable scholar, the first of which he said was "concerned with the script and prounciation, and the other with the Lombardic script, which the author said he copied from a manuscript codex of great antiquity which he called 'the Silver.' This was the first publication in print of any Gothic text, and it gave the manuscript its name, Codex Argenteus. Vulcanius identified Ulfilas as the translator of Gothic text of the Bible. Vulcanius's book included images of Gothic script as compared to other ancient languages. 

"Later the manuscript became the property of the Emperor Rudolph II, and when, in July 1648, the last year of the Thirty Years' War, the Swedes occupied Prague, it fell into their hands together with the other treasures of the Imperial Castle of Hradcany. It was subsequently deposited in the library of Queen Christina in Stockholm, but on the abdication of the Queen in 1654 it was acquired by one of her librarians, the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius. He took the manuscript with him to Holland, where, in 1662, the Swedish Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie bought the codex from Vossius and, in 1669, presented it to the University of Uppsala. He had previously had it bound in a chased silver binding, made in Stockholm from designs by the painter David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl" (http://www.ub.uu.se/arv/codexeng.cfm, accessed 11-22-2008).

Munkhammar, Lars. The Silver Bible: Origins and History of the Codex Argenteus. (Uppsala, 2011).

Uppsala University Library makes a digital facsimile of the codex available on line at: http://www.ub.uu.se/en/Collections/Manuscript-Collections/Silver-Bible/Codex-Argenteus-Online/, accessed 01-22-2013.

Benedict of Nursia, better known as St. Benedict (San Benedetto da Norcia), founded the Abbey of Monte Cassino in Compania, Italy. 

Benedict's Rule, formulated near the end of his life (547), based the foundations of monastic life on prayer, study, and the assistance of the sick. Benedict's rule was influenced by the rule of John Cassian who founded the first monasteries in Europe near Marseille, southern Gaul, about 415 CE.

♦ "Every monastery, therefore, was obliged to have a doctor to attend patients and a separate place in the cloister where the sick could be treated. It thus became necessary for one, at least, of the monks to collect scientific material, to study it and to hand on his knowledge to those who would, in time, take his place. In this way was started that practical teaching which was transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation to the great advantage of the sick breathren of the monastery. As many codices of Latin and Greek learning as could be found were collected, and translations and extracts made for the use of those who, either because their studies had been only elementary or because they lacked the time,  were incapable of reading their authors in the original text.

"What was the position of the monkish doctor in these religious colonies? It is true that in Benedictine monasteries the doctor was not granted a well-defined position by the monastic rule, like the Prior, the nurse (a man, of course—with a post which was merely administrative), the chaplain, the cellarer or the librarian. The title of medicus was, therefore, not official; its holder had no disciplinary power, and it could not directly procure him any privileges. It was a mere name given to monks who, as a result of their studies, showed some special capacity for the art of healing. But, without having any official status among the dignitaries of the monastery, they yet had a high moral position in the community. In official monastic documents they signed after those monks who were invested with the highest monastic rank. Their elevated moral position is quite clear from the important missions entrusted to thrm by great personages of the day, missions of trust which would not have been given to individuals who were not held in considerable esteem. . . .

"The doctor treated his patients, prescribed the medicaments and prepared them himself, using those which he kept in the armarium pigmentorum. The herb garden, which existed in every monastery, allowed him to have at hand the medicinal plants he needed. The students whom he gathered round him in the monastery helped him to treat the patients and prepared the medicines. The work was done in the Infirmary, a place varying in size with the importance of the monastery, and set apart from the dormitory and the refectory of the monks themselves. Into the Infirmary were taken not only sick monks but also gentlemen, townspeople, and even labourers who applied for admission. The monastic doctor, besides his practice, had also to undertake the copying of medical texts. . . . In each great Benedictine monastery a real studium was formed, from which doctors were sent to the minor centres. The work of the doctor, however, was not limited by the monastery walls. At that time, when civilian medicine was generally represented by bone-setters and travelling quacks, the services of the monastery doctor were asked of the Prior whenever a person of importance or a member of his family fell ill in the neighbourhood. Permission was given freely and lasted during the whole treatment. The monastic doctor was never sent away on duty unless accompanied by another monk or by one of his pupils. Owing to his vow of poverty, he himself could receive no reward for his services, but splendid donations in lands, money or kind were made by great lords who willingly gave such gifts pro recuperata valetudine" (Capparoni, "Magistri Salernitani Nondum Cogniti". A Contribution to the History of the Medical School of Salerno [1923] 3-5).

Concerning books and study Benedict's rule stated in its 48th chapter, Of Daily Manual Labor:

"Idleness is the enemy of the soul; hence brethren ought, at certain seasons, to occupy themselves with manual labour, and again at certain hours, with holy reading. . . .

"Between Easter and the calends of October let them apply themselves to reading from the fourth hour till near the sixth hour.

"From the calends of October to the beginning of Lent let them apply themselves to reading until the second hour. . . . During Lent, let them apply themselves to reading from morning until the end of the third hour. . . and, in these days of Lent, let them receive a book apiece from the library, and read it straight through. These books are to be given out at the beginning of Lent" (Clark, The Care of Books [1902] 56). 

Benedict's Rule mentioned a library without mentioning the scriptorium that would later become an integral part of monastic life.

♦ Benedictine scriptoria, where the copying of texts not only provided materials needed in the routines of the community and served as work for hands and minds otherwise idle, also produced a desirable product that could be sold. Early commentaries on the Benedictine rule suggest that manuscript copying was a common occupation of at least some Benedictine communities. Montalembert drew attention to the 6th-century rule of St Ferreol that regarded transcription as the equivalent of manual labor since it charges that the monk "who does not turn up the earth with the plow ought to write the parchment with his fingers" (Wikipedia article on Scriptorium, accessed 02-22-2009).

"Benedictine scriptoria, and with them libraries, became active not in the time of St. Benedict himself, but under the impulse of Irish (and later English) monks on the continent in the seventh and eighth centuries. The influence of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries, principally the Wessex-born Boniface and his allies and helpers, was especially strong in Germany, leading to the foundation of episcopal centers such as Mainz and Würzburg, and of monasteries that were to become famous for their libraries such as Fulda (744) and Hersfeld (770). The Anglo-Saxons brought with them a script and books from the well-stocked English libraries. In the course of time the preparation (and even sale) as well as consumption of books became a characteristic aspect of continental monastic life and the library a central part of the monastery" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in Stam (ed) The International Dictionary of Library History I [2001] 105).

•The image is a portrait of Benedict  from a fresco in the cloister of San Marco in Florence.

"In classical times the publication of a book had followed a rather exclusive pattern. A new work could be offered by the author to some friend or sponsor, or it could be publicaly read, or in some cases deposited in a public library. Thereafter, whoever wished to become the owner of a copy had to hire a scribe, give orders to literate slave, or copy himself from a borrowed example. This system led to each sample having a highly individual nature, to the point that when Pliny lamented the negligence of copyists who had departed from the exactitude of the prototype of the illustratrated treatise by Crateuas he suggested that the new copies should be amended by going back to a specialised medical garden for a new start. The prescription was agains the formation of a tranmission from model to copies; in fact each copy would have been an independent original work.

"Prior to the existence of efficient copyists, public libraries and fulfilled the need to go back to the prototype, providing editors with a number of examples by which to control their new edition.

"In 534, Securus Melior Felix, a school master who practiced his trade on the Forum Traiani, amended Martianus Capella's Nuptiae Mercurrii et Philologiae with the help of his disciple Deuterius but unfortunately checking his work, as he states, against very defective examples. The proximity of his working place to the famous Bibliotheca Ulpia had been of little help in this case. Already at the time when the Historia Augusta was composed, many books from that library had been transferred to the baths of Diocletian. The contents of the Ulpian library had become legendary. One of the authors of the Historia, writing under the pseudonym of Flavius Volpiscus Syracusanus, mentions an ivory book, of which he even gives the class-number in the library's shelves.

"In the fourth century, the catalogue of the regions [Libellus de regionibus urbis Romae] gives the number of twenty-eight libraries in Rome. Many were still extant in the sixth century before the Gothic wars, although in what condition we do not know. Almost all the public libraries of Rome were attached to a temple and they must have suffered from the measures taken by Theodosius against pagan worship after the defeat of Eugenius. A library is a collection of fragile material, particularly if the majority of its books are made of papyrus and therefore require constant care. We may presume that the closing of the temples was one of the causes of the loss of many texts by classic authors.

"It has been suggested that the collections of books in the villas of Campania were transferred to the newly founded monasteries. There is no evidence for this supposition, nor it seems was there any intention to keep an eye on things reputedly pagan and at least distracting. Maintaining a library is expensive and there were not the conditions for imposing an extra expenditure on a monastery. It is certain that the long campaign of Justinian against the Goths inflicted a terrible blow to all the cultural structures of the ancient capital and of many municipal towns. We have a very authoritative witness for this disaster in Cassiodorus.

"In his introduction to the Institutiones, Cassiodorus tells us how in the same year 534 when Securus Melior Felix was editing Martianus Capella, he had tried with the help of Pope Agapitus to build a lbirary and a school for Christian studies in Rome, on the model of that of Nisibis [Nusaybin]. This would be a new institution which would rival the public teaching of secular lterature. However, due to the wars and troubles which 'had devastated the kingdom of Italy', the project fell through" (Bertelli, "The Production and Distribution of Books in Late Antiquity," IN: Hodges & Bowden (eds) The Sixth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand [1998] 52-54).

The Academy of Gundishapur, located in the present-day province of Khuzestan, in the southwest of Iran, which contained an important library and offered training in medicine, philosophy, theology, and science, was according to the Cambridge History of Iran, "the most important medical center of the ancient world (defined as Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East) during the 6th and 7th centuries."

Codex Petropolitanus Purpureus, a 6th century Greek New Testament codex gospel book, with very many lacunae, originated in the Imperial Scriptorum of Constantinople and was dismembered by crusaders in the 12th century. The manuscript text is in two columns, 16 lines, in large majuscules (capital letters), measuring 32 x 27 cm. The lettering is in silver ink on vellum dyed purple, with gold ink for nomina sacra.

"The text is of the Byzantine text-type in a very early stage, but in some parts Caesarean readings. The 231 extant folios of the manuscript are kept in different libraries: 182 leaves in Saint Petersburg, Russia, 33 leaves on the Isle of Patmos, Greece, the rest in Rome (6), London (4 folios), Vienna (2), New York (1), and Athens (1), and Lerma (1), Greece."

"In 1896 Nicholas II of Russia commissioned Fyodor Uspensky's Russian Archaeological Institute to buy the greater part of it for the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg" (quotations from the Wikipedia article on Codex Petropolitanus, accessed 11-26-2008).

"The first extant notice of a collection of books in Japan, naturally Chinese books, dates from the sixth century. According to an early Heian genealogical compilation, Shinsen shojiroku, there was a Chinese Buddhist monk called Zhicong living in the 'capital' in the reign of the emperor Kimmei (r. 539-71) who had brought with him from China 164 rolls of Buddhist and secular works, including pharmacological studies and medical books which showed the places on the body to be used for acupuncture or moxibustion. The date is not impossibly early, particularly since the owner was an immigrant, and the precision is striking, but the source is a late one and it is wise to be cautious. Ono Noriiaki dates book-collecting from the seventh century, citing the account in Nihon shoki of Sogo no Iruka's insurrection in 645 which ended with the burning of his books. Ono also notes that the Horyu Gakumonji, a temple emponymously devoted to learning, must also have had a library at this time, although nonting is known of it" (Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century [2001] 364-5).

About 560, after the execution of Boethius, Roman Senator Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus retired and formed a school and monastery at his estate at Squillace in the far south of Italy. He named it the Vivarium, after the fishponds which were a "feature of its civilized lifestyle." The monastery included a purpose-built scriptorium, intended to collect, copy, and preserve texts. Former magister officiorum to Theodoric, the Ostrogothic ruler of Rome, Cassiodorus lived in the twilight of Late Antiquity. The Vivarium was the last effort, at the very close of the Classical period, to bring Greek learning to Latin readers, a concern shared by Boethius who had been executed in 524.

Prior to founding the Vivarium, Cassiodorus, along with Pope Agapetus I had desired to found a seminary modeled after the School of Nisibis, about which Cassiodorus had learned in Constantinople from the Quaestor Junillus. However, resources were insufficient for such a large project.

"Cassiodorus was not so much concerned with preserving ancient literature as with educating Christian clerics. But he saw, as Augustine had seen, that a grounding in the traditional liberal arts was a necessary preliminary to the interpretation and understanding of the Bible. This program of study, set out in his treatise on divine and secular learning, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium literarum, necessarily involved a supply of books and the foundation of a library. His monks were enjoined to copy manuscripts as an act of piety, paying close attention the accuracy and presentation of their handiwork. Pagan works stood on the shelves as ancillary to Christian studies, The library of Cassiodorus, apparently arranged by subject in at least ten armaria (book cupboards), is the only sixth-century example of which there is definite knowledge.

"The monastery of Vivarium and its library seem not to have long survived the death of Cassiodrus circa 580, but amid growing political distintegration and cultural decay it set an example that was widely followed elsewhere (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.) International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 104-5).

At the Vivarium Cassiodorus had monks produce a vast pandect of the bible called the Codex Grandior. He also had them copy out nine volumes of his own work, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum. "Along with detailed instruction for a religious routine, the author told how manuscripts should be handled, corrected, copied, and repaired, and included what amounted to an annotated bibliography of the best literature of the time. " (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 91).

Cassiodorus also stated "that biblical manuscripts should be bound in covers worthy of their contents, and he added that he had provided a pattern book with specimens of different kinds of bindings"  (Graham Pollard, Early Bookbinding Manuals [1984] 1). This may be the earliest detailed reference to bookbinding.

"From his [Cassiodorus's] writings we know that the library founded by him possessed 231 codices of 92 different authors, amongst which were five codices on medical subjects, including the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, Celsus and Coelius Aurelianus" (Capparoni, "Magistri Salernitani Nondum Cogniti". A Contribution to the History of the Medical School of Salerno. [1923] 3).

After the death of Cassiodorus the manuscripts at the Vivarium were dispersed, though some of them found their way into the library maintained at the Lateran Palace in Rome by the Popes.

The image is from the Codex Amiatinus, noticed under the date circa 685 in this database.

Exiled from his native Ireland, Saint Columba, founded with 12 companions a monastery on the small island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. From there they undertook the conversion of pagan Scotland and much of northern England to Christianity. Iona's fame as a place of learning and Christian mission spread throughout Europe. It became a major site of pilgrimage, and the burial ground of several kings of Scotland, Ireland and Norway.

"The establishment of Iona as the centre of Celtic Christianity outside Ireland by Columba c. 563 marked the effective beginning of the conversion of Scotland and led on in time to the foundation of such important monasteries as Lindisfarne in Northumbria and Malmesbury in the south-west. Even more spectacular was the continental mission of Columbanus [not to be confused with Columba] who blazed a trail accross Europe marked out by such important monastic foundations as those of Luxeuil in Burgundy (590), from which Corbie was founded a century later, Bobbio in northern Italy (614) and Saint Gall, which developed from a hermitage which his pupil Gallus established in Switzerland c. 613" (Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars 3rd ed [1991] 87).

British Library, Harley 1775, a mixture of the Vulgate and Old Latin translation of the Gospels, is called "source Z" in critical studies of the Latin New Testament. The manuscript was owned by Jules Cardinal Mazarin. In the early 18th century it was in the French Royal Library, ancestor of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, from which it was stolen along with several other manuscripts in 1707 by the renegade priest and adventurer, Jean Aymon. It was purchased in Holland by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, and was sold in 1753 by the widow of Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford and their daughter, to Parliament as part of the Harleian collection which was one the founding collections of the British Museum, the library portion of which eventually became the British Library.

The manuscript is written in Uncial (Littera Uncialis).

"The term 'Uncial' has been thought (perhaps mistakenly) to have been coined in reference to letters an inch high and has been ascribed,probably aporcryphally, to St. Jerome, whose reference to the script and its 'luxury' status are, in fact, somewhat disparaging. Any such remark need not to have referred to the script which we now know as Uncial. There is no word division, the text being written in  the scriptura continua of Antiquity and set out, or punctuated, per cola et commata (i.e. the length of lines primarily indicating where pauses occur and serving to clarify the sense" (Brown, A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 [1990] no. 5 and plate 5).

Between 585 and 590 the monk St. Columbanus (Columban in Irish, meaning "white dove," not to be confused with St. Columba) from Bangor in Ireland founded an abbey on the ruins of a Gallo-Roman settlement at Luxeuil.

Columban brought manuscripts from Ireland to found the abbey library. Because of the treasures it held, this Celtish monastery was sacked by Vandals in 731, and after it was rebuilt it was devastated by Normans in the ninth century, and was sacked several times thereafter.

"The output of this house over the sixth to eighth centuries furnishes not only the msost advanced writing of the period but manuscripts of the highest liturgical importance. The finest of these are constructed and articulated with originality and care. They effectively illustrate the momentous change that was to end the long period during which Latin Uncial was the dominant script for such books" (Morison, Politics and Script. . . . Barker ed. [1972] 112).

The Lombard (Langobard, Longobard) Germanic invasion of Italy in 585, which roughly coincides with the death of Cassiodorus, marked the end of the continuity of Late Latin culture in most of Italy.

According to Bernhard Bischoff, "we cannot be sure whether remnants of the twenty-eight public libraries which are mentioned in a fourth-century description of the urbs Roma continued to survive. There was certainly a library at the Lateran, and libraries and archives existed in Rome as well as in other cities like Capua, Naples, Ravenna, and Verona. There were also monastic libraries like the one in Eugippius' monastery. Copies of the Code of Justinian produced in Constantinople must have been kept ready for consultation by public administrators in their offices. If the famous Codex Pisanus of the Digest of Justinian now in Florence was not at that time in use in Italy, the papyrus copy once at Ravenna, of which a few folios are preserved at Pommerfelden near Bamberg, certainly was. We know that there still existed examplars corrected by their authors themselves, such as Boethius. There were probably manuscripts in Italy copied by Jerome himself. Marginal notes made by readers or colophons referring to the collation of texts show that many manuscripts belonged to private citizens or to specific libraries. The Codex Mediceus of Virgil was studied by the consul Turcius Rufius Apronianus Asterius (cos. 494); the name of the consul Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius (cos. 527) is found in the Paris codex of Prudentius. In many cases, the notes and corrections of readers and grammarians were fortunately preserved for us in later copies. The activities of the families of Symmachus and Nicomachus in the pagan revival at the end of the fourth century century influenced the tradition of the works of Livy. Subscriptions in a Carolingian manuscript now in the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana in Milan, G. 108 inf.s, saec. IX, testify to the existence of a school of doctors in Ravenna where the exemplar originated. Dedications in exemplars now lost were preserved by copies. The dedication page of the Calendar of 354 tells us the name of the bibliophile Valentinus and of the scribe Philocalus, who is well known as the designer of the inscriptions of Pope Damasus. All this evidence shows that most of these now-lost exemplars, whose copies we fortunately possess, were kept in libraries in Rome, Ravenna, and Campania. Some manuscripts came from Constantinople, like the archetype of Priscian and the copy of Solinus, whose scribe was the emperor Theodius II himself. I conclude this brief catalogue by referring to a small book, formerly kept in the treasure of the cathedral of Chartres, which contains the Gospel of St. John. On the basis of a statement made by Jerome, it is plausible that this little book was originally a Christian amulet. I might also mention a fragment of a Hebrew scroll, Greek codices, and the manuscripts in Gothic, all of which, except for the purple Codex Argenteus in Uppsala, ended up as palimpsests.

"The period of book production from the fourth to the sixth centuries was followed by a period of book distribution which lasted from the time of Gregory the Great to the time of Otto III (d.1002) and perhaps beyond. Many of the libraries still in existence as late as 567 were destroyed in the centuries that followed. Books kept in Rome, Campania, Ravenna, and perhaps in other centres which have not yet been identified, circulated as occasion demanded. The widespread circulation of books probably began with Gregory the Great (d.604), who had copies of his own works made for friends in Italy, for Leander bishop of Seville, and for Theodolinda, the Lombard queen who received from him a copy of his Dialogues as well as a Gospel book, of which only the priceless binding remains today, preserved in the cathedral of Monza. . .  ." (Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne [2007] 7-9).

Pope Gregory I sent the Benedictine monk Augustine of Canterbury and 40 other monks to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons of Britain.

For this purpose Gregory gave Augustine precious manuscripts, probably from the Lateran Library.

King Ethelbert of Kent, a pagan, and his wife, Berthe, a Christian, permitted the monks to preach in the town of Canterbury. Soon Augustine converted Ethelbert and within a short time at Christmas "10,000 of the king's subjects were baptized."

"Augustine reconsecrated and rebuilt an old church at Canterbury as his cathedral and founded a monastery in connection with it. He also restored a church and founded the monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul outside the walls. He is claimed to have founded the King's School, Canterbury, which would make it the world's oldest school; however there may be little more to this than that some teaching took place at the monastery."

The St. Augustine Gospels, an illuminated Gospel Book written in a sixth-century Italian uncial hand, has traditionally been considered one of the volumes brought by St. Augustine from Rome to Canterbury, England in 597. The manuscript, from the library of Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, is preserved in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is characterized by the Parker Library website as the "oldest illustrated Latin gospel book now in existence." Assuming that it travelled to England with Augustine in 597, the manuscript has been in England longer than any other book. It contains corrections to the text in an insular hand of the late 7th or early 8th century, which would confirm the presence of the manuscript in England.

"It was certainly at St. Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury in the 11th century, when documents concerning the Abbey were copied into it. The manuscript was given to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. It is still produced for the enthronements of new Archbishops of Canterbury."

"The manuscript once contained evangelist portraits for all four Evangelists. However. only the portrait for Luke is still extant (Folio 129v). A full page miniature on folio 125r prior to Luke contains twelve narrative scenes from the Passion" (Wikipedia article on the St. Augustine Gospels, accessed 11-25-2008)

Saint Columbanus founded the Abbazia di San Colombano at Bobbio, in the province of Piacenza and the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.

Bobbio became famous as a center of resistance to Arianism. The abbey library, founded by Columbanus with manuscripts that he brought from Ireland and treatises which he personally wrote, became one of the greatest libraries of the Middle Ages. Bernhard Bischoff points out:

"many books in its libary are older than the monastery and this demonstrates that Bobbio received many books second-hand. I refer especially to the copies of Cyprian, the biblical codex k of African origin, the Medici Virgil, the very ancient grammatical manuscripts, and especially, to the classical texts which lie buried in palimpsests" (Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne [2007] 9).

"The learned Saint Dungal (d. after 827) bequeathed to the abbey his valuable library, consisting of some seventy volumes, among which was the famous 'Antiphonary of Bangor'."

"Gerbert of Aurillac (afterwards Pope Sylvester II), became abbot of Bobbio in 982; and with the aid of the numerous ancient treatises which he found there he composed his celebrated work on geometry. It appears that at a time when Greek was almost unknown in western Europe, the Irish monks of Bobbio read Aristotle and Demosthenes in the original tongue."

"A tenth-century catalogue, published by Muratori, shows that at that period every branch of knowledge, divine and human, was represented in this library. Many of the books have been lost, the rest have long since been dispersed and are still reckoned among the chief treasures of the later collections which possess them.

♦ "In 1616 Cardinal Federico Borromeo took for the Ambrosian Library of Milan eighty-six volumes, including the famous "Bobbio Missal", written about 911, the Antiphonary of Bangor, and the palimpsests of Ulfilas' Gothic version of the Bible. Twenty-six volumes were given, in 1618, to Pope Paul V for the Vatican Library. Many others were sent to Turin, where, besides those in the Royal Archives, there were seventy-one in the University Library until the disastrous fire of 26 January 1904" (Wikipedia article on Bobbio Abbey, accessed 12-03-2008).

♦ Umberto Eco based the location of his 1980-83 novel The Name of the Rose, with its labyrinthine library, on the abbey at Bobbio.

The cathedral at York, York Minster, was constructed first of wood in 627, and then in 637 in stone ."A period of instability followed with York vulnerable to attack from Penda of Mercia and the Britons of North Wales. We know that the city was overrun at least twice and probably three times between the death of Oswald in 641/2 and the Battle of the Winwaed in 654/5. In about 670 St. Wilfred took over the see of York and found the structure of Edwin's church fairly lamentable 'The ridge of the roof owing to its age let the water through, the windows were unglazed and the birds flew in and out, building their nests, while the neglected walls were disgusting to behold, owing to all the filth caused by the rain and the birds.'

"Saint Wilfred set to work renewing the roof and covering it with lead, whitewashing the interior walls and installing glass windows. Based on descriptions given of other churches built at a similar time it is possible to understand something of how Wilfred's restored church at York would have looked to the 7th century worshippers who entered it. The altar, within which relics were deposited, would have been decorated with purple silk hangings of intricate woven design. Upon the altar, raised by a book rest and in a jewelled binding, would stand the illuminated gospel book. The walls and probably also the testudo (a wooden partition screening the altar) would be adorned with icons painted on wooden panels depicting the types and anti-types of the Old and New Testaments. These church paintings were essential to the evangelization of England, being the only effective way of explaining the 'the new worship' to an illiterate population. Gregory the Great called them 'the books of the unlearned'."

Under the reign of Chinese emperor Taizong of Tang (Chinese: 唐太宗; pinyin: Táng Tàizōng, Wade-Giles: T'ai-Tsung)  a library was erected in the Chinese capital containing "some fifty-four thousand rolls" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China, 2nd ed [1955] 37).

Saint Aidan, an Irish monk from Iona, founded the monastery on the tidal island at Lindisfarne off the North-East coast of England. It became a center of learning with an important library.

The Library of Maktabat al-Jami` al-Kabir (Maktabat al-Awqaf), The Great Mosque, San`a' (Sana'a), Yemen, built in the sixth year of Muhammad's Hijra, contains al large collection of early manuscripts discovered by construction workers renovating a wall in 1972.  Carbon-14 tests date some of the parchment to 645-690 CE, and paleography dates them circa 710-715 CE. These include fragments from over 1000 early Qur'an codices, including some of the oldest Qur'ans known.

Balthild, widow of Clovis II, and her son Clotaire III, founded Corbie Abbey. The first monks at Corbie came from Luxeuil Abbey, which had been founded by Saint Columbanus in 590, and the Irish respect for classical learning fostered at Luxeuil was carried forward at Corbie. The rule of these founders was based on the Benedictine rule, as modified by Columbanus.

"Above all, Corbie was renowned for its library, which was assembled from as far as Italy, and for its scriptorium. In addition to its patristic writings, it is recognized as an important center for the transmission of the works of Antiquity to the Middle Ages. An inventory (of perhaps the 11th century) lists the church history of Hegesippus, now lost, among other extraordinary treasures. In the scriptorium at Corbie the clear and legible hand known as Carolingian minuscule was developed, in about 780, as well as a distinctive style of illumination.

"Three of Corbie's ninth-century scholars were Ratramnus (died ca. 868), Radbertus Paschasius (died 865) and the shadowy figure of Hadoard. Jean Mabillon, the father of paleography, had been a monk at Corbie.

"Among students of Tertullian, the library is of interest as it contained a number of unique copies of Tertullian's works, the so-called corpus Corbiense and included some of his unorthodox Montanist treatises, as well as two works by Novatian issued pseudepigraphically under Tertullian's name. The origin of this group of non-orthodox texts has not satisfactorily been identified.

"Among students of medieval architecture and engineering, such as are preserved in the notebooks of Villard de Honnecourt, Corbie is of interest as the center of renewed interest in geometry and surveying techniques, both theoretical and practical, as they had been transmitted from Euclid through the Geometria of Boëthius and works by Cassiodorus (Zenner).

"In 1638, 400 manuscripts were transferred to the library of the monastery of St. Germain des Prés in Paris. In the French Revolution, the library was closed and the last of the monks dispersed: 300 manuscripts still at Corbie were moved to Amiens, 15 km to the west. Those at St-Germain des Prés were loosed on the market, and many rare manuscripts were obtained by a Russian diplomat, Petrus Dubrowsky, and sent to St. Petersburg. Other Corbie manuscripts are at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Over two hundred manuscripts from the great library at Corbie are known to survive" (Wikipedia article on Corbie Abbey, accessed 08-20-2009).

Rulers of the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus, Syria, established a palace library for which they obtained manuscripts from all parts of the known world.

"It is in the eighth century that we have the first firm evidence [in Japan] of collections of books maintained by the state, by religious institutions and by private individuals. The lawcodes promulagated in 702 established the first state library, the Zushoryo, which was supervised by a government ministry [in Nara] and was largely modelled on the Bi shu sheng of Tang China. It was responsible for collecting and conserving both Buddhist and Confucian books and, unlike the Bi shu sheng, was required to complile official histories. For these purposes it had a staff of 4 papermakers, 10 brushmakers, 4 inkmakers and 20 copyists, for collecting was partly dependent on the copying of texts held elsewhere. It consumed huge quantities of paper, drawn by the tenth century from 42 of the 66 provinces, and appears to have become increasingly absorbed in sutra-copying. The statutes contained  in the Engishiki include a number of regulations relating to the  Zushoryo, such as a requirement that the books be aired regularly, which shows that it also functioned as a repository of books. Precisely what books is unclear, although a ruling in 728 refers to both secular and Buddhist works as well as screens and paintings, and by 757 the Zushoryo had its own catalogue. The same source stipulates that permission was needed if somebody wished to borrow more than one item at a time, but doubtless the right to borrow was restricted. In 833 some of the buildings were burnt down and in 1027 its treasures were destroyed by fire. It may have been revived as there is a record of another fire in 1042, but it then disappears from the record until the Meiji government established a new Zushoryo in 1884" (Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century [2001] 365).

The Benedictine Abbey of St. Gall, Switzerland, is founded on a site that had been used for religious purposes since 613.

"Around 613 an Irishman named Gallus, a disciple and companion of Saint Columbanus, established a hermitage on the site that would become the Abbey. He lived in his cell until his death in 646.

"Following Gallus' death, Charles Martel appointed Othmar as a custodian of St Gall's relics. During the reign of Pepin the Short, in 719, Othmar founded the Abbey of St. Gall, where arts, letters and sciences flourished. Under Abbot Waldo of Reichenau (740-814) copying of manuscripts was undertaken and a famous library was gathered. Numerous Anglo-Saxon and Irish monks came to copy manuscripts. At Charlemagne's request Pope Adrian I sent distinguished chanters from Rome, who propagated the use of the Gregorian chant.

"In the subsequent century, St. Gall came into conflict with the nearby Bishopric of Constance which had recently acquired jurisdiction over the Abbey of Reichenau on Lake Constance. It wasn't until King Louis the Pious (ruled 814-840) confirmed the independence of the Abbey, that this conflict ceased. From this time until the 10^th Century, the Abbey flourished. It was home to several famous scholars, including Notker of Liège, Notker the Stammerer, Notker Labeo and Hartker (who developed the Antiphonal liturgical books for the Abbey). During the 9^th Century a new, larger church was built and the library was expanded. Manuscripts on a wide variety of topics were purchased by the Abbey and copies were made. Over 400 manuscripts from this time have survived and are still in the library today" (Wikipedia article on Abbey of St. Gall, accessed 01-17-2009).

The Abbey contains one of the oldest, largest and most significant medieval libraries, consisting of 2100 codices. It is the only major medieval convent library still standing in its original location. 400 of the codices in this library date before 1000 CE. These manuscripts are being made available on the Internet in a virtual library, the Codices Electronici Sangallenses.

About 731 The Venerable Bede, a Benedictine monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth, England, and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow, completed Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People). This work is the founding document of English History. 

"His works show that he [Bede] had at his command all the learning of his time. It was thought that the library at Wearmouth-Jarrow was between 300-500 books, making it one of the largest and most extensive in England. It is clear that [Benedict] Biscop made strenuous efforts to collect books during his extensive travels."

"Bede's writings are classed as scientific, historical and theological, reflecting the range of his writings from music and metrics to exegetical Scripture commentaries. He was proficient in patristic literature, and quotes Pliny the Elder, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace and other classical writers, but with some disapproval. He knew some Greek, but no Hebrew. His Latin is generally clear and without affectation, and he was a skilful story-teller. . ." (Wikipedia article on Bede, accessed 11-22-2008).

"Most of the surviving Greek literature was translated into Arabic by 750, and Aristotle, for example, became so widely studied that literally hundreds of books were written about him by Arabic scholars. The Moslems also obtained Greek works from Constantinople through regular trade channels and captured others in their various wars with the Eastern Empire" (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 78).

"The early Abbasid Caliphs, adopting a religious philosophy that encouraged learning and debate, promoted the establishment of universities and libraries throughout their realm. Early beginnings were made under Al-Mansur (754-775) and Harun al-Rashid (785-809) of Arabian Nights fame, but was Al-Mamun the Great (813-833) who brought the "House of Learning" [House of Wisdom] or university at Baghdad into prominence. With libraries, laboratories, subsidized scholars, a translating service, and even an astronomical observatory, this institution attracted scholars from Spain to India" (Harris 79).

The second Abbassid Caliph, Abu Ja'far Al-Mansur, founded the city of Baghdad. There he founded a palace library, which evolved into The House of Wisdom. The library was originally concerned with translating and preserving Persian works, first from Pahlavi (Middle Persian), then from Syriac and eventually Greek and Sanskrit.

"The House of Wisdom acted as a society founded by Abbasid caliphs Harun al-Rashid and his son al-Ma'mun who reigned from 813-833 CE. Based in Baghdad from the 9th to 13th centuries, many of the most learned Muslim scholars were part of this excellent research and educational institute. In the reign of al-Ma'mun, observatories were set up, and The House was an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and for sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, zoology and geography. Drawing on Persian, Indian and Greek texts—including those of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, Plotinus, Galen, Sushruta, Charaka, Aryabhata and Brahmagupta—the scholars accumulated a great collection of knowledge in the world, and built on it through their own discoveries. Baghdad was known as the world's richest city and centre for intellectual development of the time, and had a population of over a million, the largest in its time.The great scholars of the House of Wisdom included Al-Khawarizmi, the "father" of algebra, which takes its name from his book Kitab al-Jabr" (Wikipedia article on House of Wisdom, accessed 12-01-2008).

The House of Wisdom flourished until it was destroyed by the Mongols in the sacking of Baghdad in 1258.

The Abrogans, or Codex Abrogans, a dictionary of synonyms or glossary or word-list from Latin into Old High German, is the oldest surviving book in the German language. Abrogans ("humble") is the first word on the word-list.

The codex is preserved in the library of the Abbey of St. Gall. (St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 911).  A digital facsimile is available as part of the Codices Electronic Sangallenses (CESG) virtual library project. 

The monk Alcuin became head of the episcopal school at the Cathedral of York. This cathedral had been destroyed by fire in 741 and then rebuilt on a grander scale. Alcuin devoted himself to teaching and to building up the library at the Cathedral—the finest library north of the Alps at this time.

The production of manuscripts, and evidence of interest in books, did not begin in Germany until the last third of the eight century, just before the reign of Charlemagne.

"Few books written before this period were preserved in cathedral libraries. A codex written toward the year 700 for Basinus, who was perhaps the bishop of Trier, is preserved in the Bibliotheca Vallicelliana. Two manuscripts of canon law, one written in South France at the time of Gregory the Great, the other written about a century later in Northumbria, are still the property of the Cathedral of Cologne, to which they probably already belonged in the eighth century" (Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne [2007] 18).

The Codex Aureus of Lorsch, also known as the Lorsch Gospels, is one of the masterpieces of manuscript illumination produced during the period of Charlemagne's rule over the Frankish Empire.

"It was located for the first time in Lorsch Abbey (Germany), where it was mentioned as Evangelium scriptum cum auro pictum habens tabulas eburneas in the catalogue of the Abbey's library, compiled in 830 under Abbot Adelung. Considering gold letters in the manuscript and its location at Lorsch it was named the Codex Aureus Laurensius. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the library of Lorsch was the one of the best libraries of the world."

Just prior to Lorsch's dissolution in 1563 the manuscript was taken to Heidelberg and incorporated into the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg, from which it was stolen in 1622 during the Thirty Years' War. 

". . . the codex was broken in two and the covers torn off. The richly illustrated first half reached the Migazzi Library and after that was sold to Bishop Ignac Batthyani. This section is now in Alba Iulia, Romania, and belongs to Batthyaneum Library. The second half is in the Vatican Library. The front cover is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the back cover by the Vatican Museums of Rome" (Wikipedia article on the Codex Aureus of Lorsch, accessed 11-23-2008).

In 780 Charlemagne, King of the Franks, met Alcuin at Parma, and recognized that Alcuin was a scholar who could help him achieve a renaissance of learning and reform of the Church. Charlemagne took scholarship seriously. He had learned to read as an adult, although he never quite learned how to write. At this time of reduced literacy, outside of the clergy, writing of any kind was an achievement for kings, many of whom were illiterate.

Charlemagne induced Alcuin to move to the royal court as Master of the Palace School at Aachen, where Alcuin remained from 782-796. This school was attended by members of the royal court and the sons of noble families. At Aachen Alcuin established a great library, for which Charlemagne obtained manuscripts from the Imperial Library of Constantinople.

Also at Aachen, Alcuin developed the Carolingian minuscule, which became the writing standard for the eighth and ninth centuries.

"The use. . . of a script more compact in the body and needing less time to write, may have been decided upon in view of the plans to proceed with a State educational project, the greatest ever undertaken in the West, or perhaps anywhere at any time in the Roman Empire. For such an enterprise the employment of an accelerated script would become an interest of State, or, to be accurate, of State and Church" (Morison, Politics and Script. . . . Barker ed. [1972] 143).

"The revolutionary character of the Carolingian reform cannot be over-emphasized; efforts at taming the crabbed Merovingian and Germanic hands had been under way before Alcuin arrived at Aachen . . . . The new minuscule was disseminated first from Aachen, and later from the influential scriptorium at Tours, France, where Alcuin 'retired' as an abbot" (Wikipedia article on Carolingian minuscule, accessed 11-23-2008).

Alcuin revised the church liturgy and the Bible and, along with another scholar, Theodulf of Orleans, was responsible for an intellectual movement within the Carolingian empire in which many schools were attached to monasteries and cathedrals, and Latin was restored as a literary language. Along with these schools there was a flowering of libraries and manuscript book production.

By this time the Imperial Library at Constantinople is thought to have to declined to about 35,000 manuscript volumes.

The court library of Charlemagne at Aachen set an example for abbey and cathedral scriptoria throughout the Holy Roman Empire.

"The titles of classical books jotted down in a Berlin manuscript circa 790 have been shown to be a partial list of the library at Aachen. It is remarkable for the range and rarity of the authors represented—Sallust, Martial, Lucan, and Cicero, for example—some of whose books had scarcely survived the Merovingian period. Indeed, it is characteristic of many textual traditions propagated in Carolingian times from old (fifth- or sixth-century) manuscripts, with an intermediate stage. Very little that was recopied in the crucial ninth century was subsequently lost, and the diligent collecting of these earlier representatives themselves ensured the survival of many ancient codices in capitals and uncials.

"Many monastic libraries evidently relied upon copies taken from the palace library for their stock. Some such as Corbie on the Somme or St. Martin at Tours, seem to have benefited spectacularly from their close connection to the court. Other books would be bequeathed by wealthy patrons or procured from outside by persistent begging for loans such as Lupus, Abbot of Ferrières (south of Paris) in the mid-ninth century, engaged in for much of his life. Monastic and cathedral libraries also freely exchanged copies of works as they were needed, along regular routes of circulation. France, especially in the north and central areas, had the lions share of this general revival of learning in terms of numbers of books produced, but the old Irish monasteries in Germany — Fulda, Hersfeld, St. Gall-and more modern foundations such as the imperially favored abbey of Lorsch, south of Mainz, also housed and recopied large numbers of manuscripts old and new, some of them of great importance. Of the seven ancient Italian manuscripts on which the text of Virgil rests, at least four were preserved in Carolingian monasteries in France and Germany" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries," Stam (ed)., The International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 105-6).

In the first Viking raid on Britain Vikings sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne and its library.

"In England the Viking Age began dramatically on January 6, 793 when Norsemen destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne, a center of learning famous across the continent. Monks were killed in the abbey, thrown into the sea to drown or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures. Three Viking ships had beached in Portland Bay four years earlier, but that incursion may have been a trading expedition that went wrong rather than a piratical raid. Lindisfarne was different. The Viking devastation of Northumbria's Holy Island shocked and alerted the royal Courts of Europe. 'Never before has such an atrocity been seen,' declared the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York. More than any other single event, the attack on Lindisfarne cast a shadow on the perception of the Vikings for the next twelve centuries. Not until the 1890s did scholars outside Scandinavia begin seriously to reassess the achievements of the Vikings, recognizing their artistry, the technological skills and the seamanship" (quoted from the Wikipedia article on the Viking Age, accessed 11-22-2008).

"Monasteries were a favoured target due to the riches which were contained in them. Jarrow was invaded in 794 and Iona in 795, 802 and 806. After repeated raids by the Norsemen, the monks of Lindisfarne fled the monastery in AD 875, taking the venerated relics of Saint Cuthbert with them for safekeeping" (http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/vikings_5.htm, accessed 11-22-2008).

It is thought that about this time library catalogs were introduced in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and in other medieval Islamic libraries, where books were organized into specific genres and categories.

"On Christmas Day AD 800 the king of the Franks was crowned emperor, successor of the Caesars in the West, by the sucessor of the Apostle Peter in Rome. Charlemagne (742-814) ruled over a vast ecclesiastico-political state that was to a remarkable degree created by the missionaries who had come from Ireland and England to convert the heathen. Trained in Saxon England and following the example of Columbanus, wandering monks from Wilfrid (634-709) to Boniface evangelized and colonized the Netherlands and Germany, establishing monasteries and bishropics in the name of the Apostle Peter, and carrying with them books which their forerunners, Benedict Biscop and Hadrian, had brought to England from Rome. The vigour of the Carolingian renewal of the period 751 to 814 can in part be explained in terms of the youth of its ecclesiastical establishment. When Charlemagne became sole ruler of the Franks in 751, virtually every ecclesiastical foundation east of the Rhine was still governed by its first or second abbot and chapter, the majority of whom were Hiberno-Saxon.

"The Carolingian programme of renewal was consciously based on Antiquity. Order and stability lay in a vigorous revival of that which was useful and applicable from the Roman past: e.g. its imagery and art forms, such as the human figure as the central theme of art, or its reliance on the written word. Although, culturally, its upward trajectory had peaked by AD 877, this Carolingian renewal had by then insured the survival of ancient art and literature. The text of virutally every ancient Latin author is today edited largely from Carolingian manuscripts. Texts of only a handful of ancient authors—Tibullus, Propertius, Catullus among them—are not reconstructed from manuscripts of the Carolingian renaissance.

"The new empire, like the old, was defined by a uniformity in practice. Laws were codified; liturgy was standardized; adminstrative procedures were promulagated in capitularies. Wherever possible, Carolingian government tried to base its actions on an authoritative text. It hunted out the autograph of the Benedictine Rule from Montecassino. It sought the autograph of Gregory's sacramentary from the Lateran Palace. Manuscripts copied from these authoritative examplars each carried an authenticating subscription. Under Theodulf of Orléans (750-821), Jerome's translation of the Bible was reviewed in light of the Greek text" (Rouse, "The Transmission of the Texts," Jenkyns (ed) The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal [1992] 46-47).

Codex Sangallensis 1092, The Plan of Saint Gall (St. Gall), "the only surviving major architectural drawing from the roughly 700-year period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the 13th century," was created between 820 and 830 CE.

The plan, which includes a library, probably depicts an ideal Benedictine monastic compound,

"including churches, houses, stables, kitchens, workshops, brewery, infirmary, and even a special house for bloodletting. . . . much has been learned about medieval life from the Plan. The absence of heating in the dining hall, for instance, was not an oversight but was meant to discourage excessive enjoyment of meals. In the quarters for the 120-150 monks, their guests, and visitors, the ratio of toilet seats was better than what modern hygenic codes would prescribe." 

In 1979 the University of California Press published a monumental three-volume study in folio format by Walter Horn and Ernest Born entitled The Plan of St. Gall. A Study of the Architecture & Economy of, & Life in a Paradigmatic Carolinian Monastery.  From the standpoint of book design and production this work with more than 1000 pages was one of the most spectacular scholarly publications of the late 20th century. Three years later, in 1982 to accompany an exhibition concerning the plan, the U.C. Press issued another spectacular, but much thinner volume of 100 pages, The Plan of St. Gall in Brief: An overview based on the 3-volume work. . . including selected facsimile illustrations color and black and white, and also a Note on Architectural Scale Models, with illustrations in color of the Reconstruction Scale Model of the Monastery of the Pllan of St. Gall, as interpreted by Horn and Born, and crafted in bassword by Carl Bertil Lund.

By 2012 a website at www.stgallplan.org was built to place the Plan of St. Gall in its widest cultural context. Aspects of this website were summarized by Richard Matthew Pollard and Julian Hendrix in "Digital Devotion from Carolingian Reichenau and St. Gall," Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures I (2012) 292-302. | 10.1353/dph.2012.0021, from which I quote:

"A long-term digitization project ( www.stgallplan.org) to bring the Carolingian plan for the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland to life has earned justified praise for its impact. The project calls attention to and increases understanding of Carolingian monastic life at one of the great houses of the time. Whether the library was ever intended to be constructed or whether it was an imaginative conceptualization of an ideal library is immaterial to the light the project has shed on Carolingian spirituality. This article both introduces the project and demonstrates how digitization of manuscripts can increase the data available for studying devotion and the religious emotions that it entailed.

"There are few single documents more important for the history of medieval art, architecture, monasticism, and, as we hope to show in this essay, devotional emotions, than the famous drawing known as the Plan of St. Gall. This document, now preserved at the monastery Stiftsbibliothek in Switzerland, was drawn up for abbot Gosbert of St. Gall by two scribes of the sister monastery of Reichenau, on Lake Constance, around 820. An early and accomplished piece of technical drawing, the Plan measures 112 by 77.5 cm (slightly smaller than A0 paper, for those keeping track) and is made of five pieces of parchment sewn together. It depicts a large monastery complex, centred around an elaborate church, with cloister and refectories, scriptorium and library, alongside breweries, bakeries, a mill, and even a shoemaker'€™s shop. We do not know why exactly it was drawn up, but the dedication, probably written by Haito, abbot of Reichenau, indicates that it was given to Gosbert so that he might 'exercise your ingenuity and recognize my devotion.'€  Gosbert was undertaking building projects at the time, and so the plan may have been prompted by Gosbert'€™s desire to begin construction at St. Gall. It is clear, however, that St. Gall was not built from this plan, though some of the buildings there might have been inspired by it (Jacobsen). It is perhaps better to think of the Plan as a very detailed sketch of '€œthe ideal monastery' in the Carolingian imagination, where the whole world is reordered to the service of God (Dey 1940).  

"It is an unfailing axiom of medieval history that the ease of access to a document declines in proportion to its importance. This, and the Plan'€™s unwieldy size, has made it a difficult resource to use. Several years ago, therefore, Patrick Geary, of UCLA, and Bernard Frischer, of the University of Virginia, conceived of a project to make the Plan, and ancillary bibliography and analysis of it, accessible in virtual form. With the cooperation of the St. Gall librarians, extremely high-resolution pictures were taken of the Plan, and displayed using a special java applet, allowing the images to be panned, rotated, and zoomed. The result is actually much more useful and detailed than what one could experience with the large and unwieldy Plan.  In this first phase of the project, ancillary documents were added alongside to help contextualize the monastic environment that produced the Plan. Initially this focused on material culture: for instance, images of hundreds of Carolingian objects (pots, brooches, carvings, etc.) were put online to give a sense of the things used and produced in a monastery like that represented in the Plan. The second phase of the project aims to give a sense of the intellectual environment that produced the Plan by giving access to the books that were present at Reichenau (and St. Gall) when the Plan was produced. The project has acquired digital reproductions of 168 manuscripts present at Carolingian Reichenau and St. Gall. These are being presented in the same, high-resolution, zoomable form as the Plan, and are paired with updated descriptions."

At Stoudios (Latin: Studium), a monastery near Constantinople, Abbot Theodore produced a new set of monastic regulations that emphasized the scriptorium and the library, and outlined the duties of the librarian.

"The evidence for the arrangement and contents of libraries in and before the ninth century is sparse. In the earliest times the numbers to be stored were small. As there was no pressing problem of storage or access, the need for elaborate finding aids did not arise. Between 300 and 400 manuscripts—most with two or more works within them—was a good-sized collection for a Carolingian monastery: St. Gall owned 395 codices in 835 and the Cologne cathedral had 108 in 833. From the most prolific scriptorium of the age, that of Tours, 350 manuscripts still survive. The oldest library catalogs, such as that of Fulda in the mid-eighth century, are no more than lists of titles, often imperfect and for the most part simple inventories of the books as they stood on the shelf. The order of the lists reflects the usual subject arrangement: Bibles first, followed by glosses, liturgies, patristic works, philosophy, law, grammar, sometimes with historical and medical works at the end, and classical works scattered among the relevant headings. The Lorsch catalogs of the earlier part of the ninth century are a good deal lengthier and more detailed, with 590 titles arranged in 63 classes. Since monasteries were places of education as well as worship, many of the classical texts and nearly all the grammatical works would have been used as school texts. Books were usually stored in cupboards, either in the church or in the cloister closest adjoining it, sometimes in the refectory (for communal reading) as well. The separate library room was, in general, a later development, but in an early ninth-century plan believed to be an idealized scheme of a monastery with a bibliotheca and scriptorium attached to the church, survives in St. Gall" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.) The International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 106).

In 1867 Danish Vikings destroyed the great library of the Cathedral of York. This library had been considerably augmented by the efforts of Alcuin, and had become even more famous after Alcuin's time. In following centuries this church and its area passed into the hands of numerous invaders. York Cathedral was destroyed by the Danes in 1075.

"It was said that Baghdad alone had over one hundred booksellers in 891, and that at the height of its cultural glory it had some thirty public libraries" (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World [1999] 79).

The most famous Greek manuscript of the Homeric Iliad, Venetus A, is regarded by some as the best text of the epic. It also preserves several layers of annotations, glosses, and commentaries known as the "A scholia."  These are thought to preserve editorial comments made by scholars at the Royal Library of Alexandria centuries earlier. The manuscript, which was most probably written in Constantinople, also includes a summary of the early Greek Epic Cycle which is considered the most important source of information on those lost poems. 

"At some point Venetus A was transported to Italy, but how and when this happened is uncertain. At one point it was thought that Giovanni Aurispa brought it there. In 1424, in a letter to [Ambrogio] Traversari in Venice, he mentioned four volumes which he had brought back from Greece:

Aristarchum super Iliade in duobus voluminibus, opus quoddam spatiosum et pretiosissimum; aliud commentum super Iliade, cuius eundem auctorem esse puto et illius quod ex me Nicolaus noster habuit super Ulixiade.

Aristarchus on the Iliad in two volumes, a large and very precious work; another commentary on the Iliad; I think Aristarchus was the author of that, as well as of the one on the Odyssey that our friend Niccolò Niccoli got from me.

"Aurispa already owned the "two volumes" in 1421; this suggests that he may have brought them back from a trip to Greece in 1413. . . .

"Venetus A came into the possession of Cardinal Bessarion, the Greek immigrant and scholar, and the man most directly responsible for the Western rediscovery of Greek literature in the Renaissance. Bessarion collected over a thousand books in the fifteenth century, including the only complete text of Athenaios' Deipnosophistai; the autograph of Planudes' Greek Anthology; and Venetus A.

"In 1468 Bessarion donated his library to the Republic of Venice, and the library was increased by further acquisitions from Bessarion until his death in 1473. This collection became the core of the Biblioteca Marciana. Bessarion made a condition that scholars wishing to consult the library should deposit books, but no attempt to enforce this was made until 1530.

"The earliest known scholar to have used Venetus A as a source is Martinus Phileticus in the 1480s; in this he was followed by Vettore Fausto in 1546 or 1547.

"In 1554 Bessarion's library was transferred to the building designed for it by Sansovino, the Biblioteca Sansoviniana [.e. the Biblioteca Marciana.] It remains there today.

"After that, Venetus A was largely forgotten until Villoison rediscovered and published it, along with the "B scholia" from Venetus B, in 1788. This was the first publication of any Iliadic scholia other than the "D" scholia (the scholia minora). The A and B scholia were a catalyst for several new ideas from the scholar Friedrich August Wolf. In reviewing Villoison's edition, Wolf realised that these scholia proved conclusively that the Homeric epics had been transmitted orally for an unknown length of time before appearing in writing. This led to the publication of his own seminal Prolegomena ad Homerum, which has set the agenda for much of Homeric scholarship since then" (Wikipedia article on Venetus A, accessed 01-31-2010).

In May 2007 the Venetus A manuscript was scanned at very high resolution in 3-dimensions at the Bibliotheca Marciana. That technical process was described in Wired Magazine.

♦ You can view a high-resolution 2-dimensional digital facsimile of the manuscript, including details of significant areas and ultraviolet images of badly faded text, from the website of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University at this link. 

Though the date of its foundation remains uncertain, the Schola Medica Salernitana (Italian: Scuola Medica Salernitana) in the coastal south Italian city of Salerno, was the first western medical school, representative of both the Greek and Arabic medical traditions. It may have been founded in the early tenth century. Texts representative of both the Greek and Arabic traditions had accumulated in the ancient library of the Abbey of Monte Cassino. Especially as these were translated into Latin, beginning in the 11th century, by physicians and scholars associated with the medical school, the received lore of Hippocrates, Galen and Dioscorides was supplemented and invigorated by Arabic medical practice, known from contacts with Sicily and North Africa. As a result, the medical practitioners of Salerno, both men and women, were unrivalled in the medieval Western Mediterranean.

The school, which found its original base in the dispensary of a monastery founded in the 9th century, reached its greatest fame between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, from the last decades of Lombard power, during which its fame began to spread more than locally, to the fall of the Hohenstaufen. The arrival in Salerno of Constantinus Africanus (Constantine the African) in 1077, marked the beginning of Salerno's classic period.  In the 11th century, through the encouragement of Alfano I, Archbishop of Salerno, who was a translator from the Arabic and a medical doctor himself, and the translations of Constantinus Africanus, Salerno gained the title of "Town of Hippocrates" (Hippocratica Civitas or Hippocratica Urbs). People from all over the world flocked to the "Schola Salerni", both the sick, in the hope of recovering, and students, to learn the art of medicine.

Caliph of Cordoba in the Al-Andalus (Moorish Iberia), Al-Hakam II was fond of books and learning, and amassed a vast library that may have contained over 400,000 books. During his reign a massive translation effort was undertaken, and many books were translated from Latin and Greek into Arabic. He formed a joint committee of Arab Muslims and Iberian Mozarab Christians for this task.

The catalogue of the royal library "alone consisted of forty-four volumes. Under Al-Haim II (961-976) this library was reported to have given employment to over 500 people. . . . Elsewhere at Moslem Spain there was a total of seventy libraries in the 10th century, several in Toledo. In addition to the royal library, these included libraries in universities in Cordoba, Seville, Malaga, and Granada , among others, and in numerous mosques. Private libraries flourished in Moslem Spain, and it was said that Cordoba was the greatest book market in the western world in the 10th century." (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 81).

The Leningrad Codex, probably written in Cairo, is the earliest extant complete text of the Bible in Hebrew. It has been preserved in St. Petersburg since the mid-19th century, and is now housed in the Russian National Library.

"With the decline of the whole central administration [in Japan] during the Heian period the Zushoryo [the first national library of Japan in Nara] ceased to have such extensive importance and the slave-like guild of papermakers, which had heretofore been kept apart from their contemporaries, gradually merged with the common people and it was not long before the entire Imperial staff was reduced in number and talent. Because of the absence of materials, paper, and skilled workers, the owners of private estates began the erection of small paper mills and they endeavoured to induce the former Zushoryo papermakers to resume their work for them in the fabrication of paper. Up to this time about the only materials used for the making of paper in Japan were the mulberry, gampi (Wikstroemia canescens), and hemp (Cannabis sativa), but as early as 1031 it was recorded that waste paper became a useful material for remaking into sheets of paper. The Chinese, no doubt, had used the method of reclaiming material much earlier, and inasmuch as the Japanese received nearly all of their ideas from China it is reasonable to surmise that there was no exception in this instance. In Japan the remade paper became the sole commodity of the paper-shops (kamiya) and was known by the name of kamiya-gami, literally paper-shop paper. The reclaimed material used in the making of the kamiya-gami was charged with ink and pigment and therefore the paper manufactured from the used material was of a grey tone. It has been stated that even books from the Imperial Library were macerated into pulp to be formed into sheets of the shukushi paper, always of a dull colour due to the writing on the paper from which it was fabricated" (Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, 2nd ed, 1957, 54).

The sacking of Cairo resulted in destruction of its 200,000 volume Palace Library.

Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World, 4th ed. [1999] 80.

"Once libraries had outgrown the cupboards or chests of earlier times, a separate library room became a common feature from the 12th century onward. The arrangement of a typical later medieval library is known from some surviving examples, although the fittings in all of them have been altered over the centuries. In general the room would be long and fairly narrow, built on the second floor to protect against damp and give adequate light. Ranged along the walls between the windows and projecting at right angles from them would be long lecterns for reading the books. The books themselves would lie flat on shelves underneath the lecterns, to which the reader (standing up) would bring them on chains. There was often a written shelf list affixed to the end of each lectern to show what books were on the shelves. This would be, in effect, an extract of the catalog, which continued to reflect the actual physical grouping of the codices. The common libraries of convents and colleges would usually be kept locked, the key in possession of the librarian, who could variously be called the armarius, cantor or precentor, librarius, custos librorum, or bibliothecarius. The position and duties of the librarius were laid down in some detail by Humbert of Romans, general of the Dominicans, in his Instructiones officialium from around 1260. and these were often adapted and expanded in later library regulations. Not all the books in an institution were chained; It was the custom in colleges and friaries, as it was earlier and continued to be in monasteries, to make an annual distribution of books to fellows, brothers, or monks for their learned or edifying reading. These loans could on occasion stretch out over many years, or even a lifetime" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.) International Dictionary of Library Histories [2001] 107).

Norman Crusaders overan the Greek peninsula and took manuscripts as spoils of war. "When Michael Acominatus became Archibshop of Athens in 1275 he noted that the city had no libraries at all, and that his two chests of books constituted the largest collection of literature in the city" (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 75).

Moses Maimonides, rabbi, physician, and philosopher in Spain, Morocco and Egypt, wrote the Guide for the Perplexed, of which an early autograph draft is preserved in the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah collection at Cambridge University Library, gathered from the Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue Old Cairo, along with several other autograph manuscripts and fragments by Maimonides.

Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, thought to have been completed by 1190,

"is the main source of the Rambam's philosophical views, as opposed to his opinions on Jewish law. Since many of the philosophical concepts, such as his view of theodicy and the relationship between philosophy and religion, are relevant beyond strictly Jewish theology, it has been the work most commonly associated with Maimonides in the non-Jewish world and it is known to have influenced several major non-Jewish philosophers. . . . Within Judaism, the Guide became widely popular and controversial, with many Jewish communities requesting copies of the manuscript."

Beginning around the year 1200, European monasteries no longer remained the only purchasers of books, and manuscript book production started moving from the exclusive domain of monastic scriptoria to the secular community. Intellectual life began to be increasingly centered outside the monasteries at the universities. There scholars, teachers and students, in cooperation with booksellers, artisans and craftsmen, organized an active manuscript book trade.

By the second quarter of the 13th century a much expanded demand for books for individual use encouraged the production of increasing numbers of picture books. Illustrated accounts of the lives of popular saints and other historical characters were typical productions.

"So numerous were the private libraries [in the Muslim world] that one writer has estimated that, as of 1200, there were more books in private hands in the Moslem world than in all libraries, public and private, of western Europe." (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 81.)

"Not the least important in the destruction of Islamic libraries were the depredations of the Christian crusaders from the 11th to the 13th centuries. In Syria, Palestine, and parts of North Africa, the Christians destroyed libraries as enthusiastically as had the barbarians in Italy a few hundred years earlier. When Spain was reconquered from the Arabs, the great Islamic libraries at Seville, Cordoba, and Granada were destroyed or carried away by their retreating owners." (Harris 84).

"Not before the fifteenth century were there large collections of Greek manuscripts assembled in the West, and only from the sixteenth century on were they used by a substantial number of Western scholars and other interested parties. The greater portion of the Greek inventory of the Dominican Library in Basel, the Laurentiana in Florence, the Marciana in Venice, the Vaticana in Rome, the Hapsburg Hofbibliothek in Vienna, and the Bibliothèque du Roi in Paris was first brought together through the combined efforts of Greek emigrants, Latin Humanists, and bibliophile princes. Yet ancient Greek book collections were not inaccessible to the Latin Middle Ages. Greek monasteries, none of which could have been completely without books, flourished in Rome from the seventh to the eleventh century. Grottaferrata has preserved parts of its ancient hoard of Greek books even up to the present day.

"There were populous Latin districts in Constantinople during the high Middle Ages, and in this period a great number of Italian scholars lived in the Christian metropolis on the Bosporus and made use of the rare-book libraries of the city. Moses of Bergamo was one of these scholarly Italians in twelfth-century Constantinople; he is the first Westerner known to have collected Greek manuscripts in great volume. If his own testimony is true, then the hunt for Greek manuscripts began two centuries before Guarino of Verona and Giovanni Aurispa.

"The Greek libraries of southern Italy were even closer to the Latins than those in Constantinople. Casole in Apulia, Carbone in the Basilicata, Stilo in Calabria, and Messina in Sicily had the most notable monastic libraries of the Italo-Greeks; the Cathedral Library of Rossano is still in possession of its cimelia, the famous sixth-century Greek purple evangelary ('Codex purpureus Rossanensis'), which was not 'rediscovered' there by scholars until 1879 and which recalls the significance of southern Italy for the transmission of Greek texts.

"Not before the manuscript research of recent years has the astonishing volume and the high quality (manuscripts of the classics!) of Italo-Greek book production and transmission come to light. Manuscript by manuscript, a 'translatio studii' from Byzantium to the West appears, whose line of textual transmission threads its way directly from the Macedonian Renaissance in tenth-century Constantinople, to the court library of the Norman and Hohenstaufen rulers of southern Italy, to the papal library of 1300; the Italian Renaissance picked up this thread as its starting point.

"This hoard of Greek books first appears in 1295 at the end of a catalogue of the papal library:

'Item Dyonisius super celesticam [!] Ierarchicam [!] in greco. Item Simplicius super phisicam Aristotilis . . .'

"With the exception of Dionysius the Areopagite (characteristically placed at the beginning of the list) and one other work, the twenty-three volumes all contain works of natural science and philosophy—a remarkable collection for the papacy (ed. A. Pelzer, Addenda et emendanda ad Francisci Ehrle Historiae Bibliothecae Romanorum Pontificum ... tomum 1 [Rome 1947], pp. 23 f).

"A catalogue of the papal library from 1311 lists the same stock of Greek books:

'tem libri, qui sequuntur scripti in greco: primo scripsimus comentum Procli Permenidem Platonis 'And' et est in papiro . . . .'

"There have been several changes. In all there are now thirty-three Greek codices; ed. F. Ehrle, Historia Bibliothecae Romanorum Pontificum tum Bonifatianae tum Avenionensis (Rome 1890), I, 95-99. In nineteen of these books one finds this remarkable 'And', for which Ehrle provides the hardly convincing resolution antiquus.

"We learn from an inventory of 1327 that the thirty-three Greek codices were kept in two crates; ed. Pelzer, Addenda et emendanda, p. 34. In 1339 they (all of them?) are found in a single crate together with Hebrew books (ibid., p.64); in 1369 there are still seven Greek books in the papal library (cf. Ehrle, Historia Bibliothecae, pp. 376 [no. 1183], 398 [no. 1512], 429 [no. 2007]. The popes obviously managed to carelessly lose their small but fine Greek collection during their Avignon adventures.

"The enigma of the notation And in the catalogue of 1311 has been solved by August Pelzer in a striking way (Addenda et emendanda, pp. 92 f.): it is to be resolved Andegavensis = Anjou! -that is, these books came to the papal library 'from Anjou.' When did the house of Anjou have cause and opportunity to present the papacy with a collection of Greek books? Pelzer answers: after the battle near Benevento (1266), when Charles of Anjou, whom the papacy had summoned to southern Italy, had disposed of the hated Hohenstaufen King Manfred. Thus the core of the Greek collection of the Norman-Staufer court library came into the possession of the papacy in 1266 in a similar way to that by which the Heidelberg Bibliotheca Palatina did in 1623.

"Codicological research has confirmed Pelzer's brilliant conclusions. Nine of the thirty-three Greek books of the 1311 catalogue have now again been identified, and the findings demonstrate clearly that this could not have been a casual acquisition by the popes or by Anjou, nor was it plunder from the conquest of Constantinople in 1204.; rather the collection came from the court in Constantinople to the court in Palermo around the middle of the twelfth century:

'Ces volumes sont de magnifiques produits des ateliers constantinopolitains au moment de la renaissance scientifique et philosophique des IXe et Xe siècles" ('These volumes are the magnificent products of the ateliers in Constantinople at the moment of the scientific and philosophical renaissance of the ninth and tenth centuries;' (P. Canart, "Le livre grec,' p. 149).

"Almost half of all known scientific 'classical manuscripts' of the Byzantine Renaissance of the ninth/tenth century have been preserved via the Norman-Staufer court library (G. Derenzini, 'All origine della traduzione di opere scientifiche classiche: vicende di testi et di codici tra Bisanzio e Palermo,' Physis 18 [1976], 87-103). Thus the history of the Greek court library in the West extends back into the twelfth century, and the Greek collections in Renaissance court libraries in the West were then not altogether without precedents.

"In the outstanding monastic and cathedral libraries of the Middle Ages, there were, however, at most only scattered Greek manuscripts. The Abbey of St. Martin in Tours possessed, at least in fragments, a Greek papyrus codex from Egypt, which contained a homily of Ephraem Syrus on 'Fair Joseph.' An illuminated Greek copy of the XPICΤΙΑΝΙΚΗ ΤΟΠΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ of Cosmas Indicopleustes has been traced to the collection of the early medieval Cathedral Library in York. Reichenau had a precious Greek Psalter from the eighth to the sixteenth century. The Abbey of St. Denis tended the splendid uncial manuscript of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite which Louis the Pious had obtained from Constantinople; various other Greek manuscripts were added in the high and late Middle Ages. In the monastery of St. Simeon, established in the Porta Nigra in Trier, there was a Greek lectionary of the tenth/eleventh century. In the midst of the Investiture Controversy, the wealthy and ostentatious canons of St. Gereon in Cologne procured a magnificent Greek Psalter, which was written and illuminated around 1077 in a scriptorium closely connected with the Greek emperor. The first illumination, by a Greek artist, shows Ο ΑΓΙΟC ΜΑΡΤΥC ΤΟΥ ΧΡΙCΤΟΥ ΓΕΡΕΩΝ.

"Μany other large libraries of the Middle Ages also had their Greek showpieces to exhibit. Occasionally, the Latin West also produced manuscripts entirely in Greek. In the ninth century, as Montfaucon has noted, Sedulius Scottus was capable of writing a Greek Psalter with odes.

"From the Ottonian period on, Greco-Italian southern Italy offered the opportunity to obtain scribes who were acquainted with the Greek alphabet. A lectionary written in 1021 by an Italo-Greek Εν χόρα Φραγκίας κάστρο δε Κoλoνίας (= Cologne?) later made its way to St. Denis. In England even Western scribes ventured to produce various Greek minuscule manuscripts. According to Μ.R. James, the Greek Psalter of Cambridge, Emmanuel College III. 3. 22 is of English origin.

"In the thirteenth century, Bishop Robert Grosseteste commissioned a large-scale Corpus Dionysiacum in Greek minuscules. Grosseteste, his students, and his assistants brought together, by means of purchasing and copying, a significant collection of Greek manuscripts in England, so that it is true, at least for this country, that interest in Greek books had already arisen in the late Middle Ages; to be sure, it was a narrow circle until Humanism created a broader audience for the purely Greek book.

"The typical medieval form of the Greek codex was the bilingual manuscript. It was an inheritance from late antiquity and the Middle Ages in part made good use of it. The Mediterranean cultural symbiosis of the late Roman Empire had brought forth many such bilinguals-Latino-Greek and Greco-Latin. The most famous examples of late antique Latino-Greek editions are the remnants of the bilingual Vergil codices, recovered from the Egyptian sand; thus far, no less than nine such bilinguals of the champion of the imperial Roman cause have been brought to light. During Justinian's time, it was certainly still possible to write codices in both imperial languages in Constantinople; the Florentine digest codex ('Codex Pisanus,' soon after 533) bears impressive witness to this fact. It seems, however, that the Byzantine Empire of the medieval period proper no longer fostered bilingual editions of Roman authors, and—if southern Italy is excluded—produced no Latino-Greek manuscripts at all. 

"A Greco-Latin Homer, the counterpart of a Latino-Greek Vergil, apparently did not exist in late antiquity. The West was interested in Christian bilinguals, in Greco-Latin editions of portions of the Bible; a Greco-Latin anthology of canon law may have also existed during late antiquity, at least in one copy.

"The Latin Middle Ages carried on the tradition of assorted scriptural bilinguals: the Psalter, Gospels, Pauline epistles, and Acts of the Apostles (in fact those four books of the Bible whose comparative study Ambrogio Traversari recommended for self-instruction in Greek!). It would have been easy for the bilingual tradition of the Acts of the Apostles to have disappeared, as other bilingual scriptural texts must have: the tradition has only two witnesses-the 'Codex Bezae' in Cambridge and the 'Codex Laudianus' in Oxford.

"The Carolingian period transmitted only the Psalter, Gospels, and Pauline epistles, to some extent in the new interlinear bilingual form, which was especially cultivated by the Irish.

"In the Ottonian period, the bilingual tradition of the Pauline epistles dies out. The fragmentary 'Codex Waldeccensis' (saec. X ex. ) completes the circle of this bilingual tradition of the Middle Ages, in which the beginning and end are joined; for this bilingual manuscript, the last of the Pauline epistles known from the Middle Ages, is an exact copy of the earliest manuscript—the 'Codex Claromontanus.'

"The production of bilingual texts of the Gospels is extraordinarily rare in the high and late Middle Ages. Yet a bilingual edition of the Apocalypse curiously surfaces at that period. The Greco-Latin Psalter reached the age of Humanism, however, in an unbroken tradition. This Greco-Latin text outlasted all else because it was the text with which the Latin Middle Ages was doubtless most intimately familiar and was thus better suited than any other text to introduce the Latins to a basic study of Greek. This tradition of the Greco-Latin Psalter manuscripts, which span the entire Middle Ages, from the Cod. Verona I (saec. VI- VII) to the Cod. Plut. XVII 13 of the Biblioteca Laurenziana (which was "erst wenige Jahre alt, als in Florenz das große Unionskonzil begann" ["only a few years old as the great Union Council began in Florence"]), and to the great trilingual (Hebreo-Greco-Latin) Psalter produced for Duke Federigo of Urbino in Florence in 1473,  presents scarcely touched material for the further investigation of Greek studies in the Latin Middle Ages.

"The Greek text is presented in various manners in these Psalters: in Greek script (generally majuscule) or in Roman transcription; the Greek and Latin texts on facing pages, in parallel columns, or arranged interlinearly. The base text (left page, left column, or principal line in interlinear versions) is generally Greek. The Psalters in which the Greek text is presented only in Roman transcription must have originally served primarily liturgical purposes: Greek liturgica were always written in the Roman alphabet in the West, since they were to be read or sung aloud and were not intended to be studied. On the other hand, manuscripts with the Greek text written in Greek script were textbooks or even showpieces. The possibilities for combination are numerous and the distinctions between them fluid: even such an obvious example of a textbook as the St. Gall psalterium quadrupartitum presented the Greek text only in Roman transcription. In general, each of the numerous bilingual Psalters of the Middle Ages requires its own particular historico-philological interpretation.

"The other Greco-Latin books of the Middle Ages may be regarded as offshoots from the main trunk of bilingual biblical texts: in the sixth century, bilinguals of the first four ecumenical councils by Dionysius Exiguus; in the eleventh century, Gregory's Dialogi; in the thirteenth century, the liturgical and polemical bilinguals of Abbot Nicholas-Nectarius of Otranto. The Dominican mission in the 'Orient' continued this latter tradition and produced its controversial theological tracts in bilingual editions ('Bartholomaeus, Contra Graecos; Buonaccorsi, Thesaurus veritatis fidei). Leontius Pilatus' translations of Homer and Euripides for the early Florentine Humanists were designed as interlinear bilinguals.

"Finally, one must not forget the striking bilingualism of the imperial correspondence from Constantinople, of which a number of splendid examples from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries have been preserved in Italian archives. When the corpus of manuscripts has finally been fully catalogued, the history of the Greco-Latin bilinguals will open one of the most informative perspectives on the ever-shifting interest in Greek texts that has perished through the ages" (Walter Berschin, "Valuation and Knowledge of Greek," Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages. From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa. Transl. by Jerold C. Frakes [1992]).

In the Fourth Crusade Norman crusaders, attempting to form a Latin Empire, sacked Constantinople, almost completely destroying the city. They burned the Imperial Library which preserved much of the knowledge of the ancient world.

The 1204 sack of Constantinople has been described as one of the most profitable and disgraceful sacks of a city in history. What the Crusaders did not plunder they burned. It is estimated that more destruction was done to the city and its libraries during this sack than  occurred during the seige of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. It is also believed that crusaders may have sold some Byzantine manuscripts to Italian buyers.

"The greatest destruction [of Muslim libraries] resulted from the raids of the Mongols in the 13th century. From the mountains and steppes of central Asia came the hordes of Genghis Khan, conquering and destroying everything before them. In the first great sweep to the Caspian Sea and northern Persia, the cities of Bokhara [Bukhara], Samarkand, and Merv [and their libraries] were destroyed along with many smaller towns. . . . (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 84-85).

The Byzantine capital having moved to Nicaea, Emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes or Ducas Vatatzes reestablished the Byzantine Imperial Library about this time.

From Nicaea the Byzantines began a campaign to recapture Constantinople from the Normans.

In 1228 the geographer Yakut al-Hamawi, visiting Merv, a major oasis-city in Central Asia, on the Silk Road, located near today's Mary in Turkmenistan, "found no fewer than twelve libraries there available to the public. Ten were endowed libraries and two were in mosques. One had over 12,000 volumes in codex form and another had been in existence since 494 A.D. Yakut noted that the lending policies of the libraries in Merv were so liberal that he was able to have 200 volumes to work with in his rooms at one time." (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 79).

". . .during the Middle Ages, particularly after Innocent IV (1243-1254), the popes moved around a great deal. In 1245, Innocent IV is known to have taken a part of the archives with him to the Council of Lyon, after which the records remained for a while stored in the monastery at Cluny. Benedict XI (1303-1304) had the archives placed in Perugia. Clement V (1305-1314) then had the archives placed in Assisi where they remained until 1339, when Benedict XII (1334-1342) had them sent to Avignon.

"The archives remained in Avignon during the time of the Great Schism. Once the difficulties were resolved, Martin V (1427-1431) had the records transported by boat and wagon to Rome, where they were temporarily housed in S. Maria Sopra Minerva then established in his family palace (Colonna) in central Rome. Though important historical records were returned to Rome at this time, including the Vatican Registers, the Avignon material, the paper registers known as the Avignon Registers, were not incorporated into the ASV until 1783" (Blouin, Jr., Vatican Archives: An Inventory and Guide. . . [1998] xviii).

Robert de Sorbon, a chaplain and confessor to King Louis IX, founded the Collège de Sorbonne, or University of Paris. Starting with 20 theology students, and virtually no library except a small collection of manuscripts, the college quickly built a prodigious reputation as a center for learning, and rapidly expanded its library mainly through donations, including the library of Robert de Douai, physician to Queen Marguerite. In Robert's will dated 1258 he left to the college 1500 pounds Parisian, and bequeathed " 'omnes libros meos de theologia, tam biblias, tam originalia, quam alios libros glosatos' which came to the Sorbonne four years later" (Rouse & Rouse, "The Early Library of the Sorbonne," Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 346).  

By the end of the thirteenth century there were as many as twenty thousand foreign students resident in Paris, making Paris the capital of knowledge of the Western world.

Mongols under the command of Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad, destroying the House of Wisdom, the leading library in the leading intellectual center of the Arab world.

The House of Wisdom, founded in the eighth century, contained countless precious documents accumulated over five hundred years. Survivors said so many books were thrown into the river that the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink; others said the waters were red from blood.

"In one week, libraries and their treasures that had been accumulated over hundreds of years were burned or otherwise destroyed. So many books were thrown into the Tigris River, according to one writer, that they formed a bridge that would support a man on horseback" (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 85).

The Emperor of Nicaea, Michael VIII Palaiologos, reconquered Constantinople, and reestablished the Imperial Library in a wing of the Great Palace of Constantinople.

"The arrangement and cataloguing of books within the individual colleges and other university institutions were also influenced by the changes in book usage reflected in the union catalogs and location lists. In monastic institutions, book collections had traditionally been kept in book chests or armaria — though the individual volumes themselves doubtless were, for much of the time, parceled out among the members of the house. We find, however, in the writings of the Dominican Humbert of Romans, about 1270, instructions that books in the armaria should be physically arranged by subject matter, and that certain ones of them should be chained at lecterns for the common use of all, rather than being either locked away in a chest or loaned for the use of only one person. Before the end of the thirteenth century, both the Collège de Sorbonne in Paris and University College in Oxford had such a collection of chained books attached to reading benches. Early in the next century, about 1320, a member of the Sorbonne compiled a subject catalog of the hundreds of individual texts bound together in some three hundred chained codexes of his college. This development — arrangement of manuscripts by subject matter, affixing chains to selected books, an index of the content of a whole collection — corresponds in its way, in both purpose and inguenuity, to the making of concordances, distinction collections, subject indexes, and union catalogs; and it is in such a context that it should be considered. The common goal of all these devices was to facilitate access to desired information" (Rouse & Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 238-39).

Theologian Gerard d' Abbeville, a Parisian master and neighbor of Robert de Sorbon, bequeathed nearly 300 volumes of manuscripts to the Library of the Sorbonne. This gift became the core of the Sorbonne Library, and of the roughly 300 volumes, 118 remain preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France today.

d'Abbeville's bequest incorporated the library of Richard de Fournival, author of the library catalogue entitled Biblionomia. Leopold Delisle characterized this catalogue as "one of the most curious monuments of the bibliographic art of the Middle Ages. The only manuscript which has survived of this small work is 'très-incorrect', and cannot be dated before the beginning of the 15th century. Having belonged to the Collège des Cho-Sorbonne, it is today part of the library of the Université de France at the Sorbonne. . . ." (translation mine, from the work cited below, 518-19).

According to Delisle, Fournival used a garden metaphor to describe his library, in which the various branches of knowledge each have their plot, but beyond the metaphor Fournival described a specific classification scheme, coordinating desk or shelf letters or numbers with different kinds of letters and colors of letters. The first division of the library was devoted to philosophy, which Fournival further broke down into nine categories on eleven shelves, arranged partly according to volume size:

1. Grammar

2. Dialectic

3. Rhetoric

4. Geometry and Arithmetic

5. Music and Astronomy

6. Physics and Metaphysics

7. Metaphysics and Morals

8. Melanges of Philosophy

9. Poetry

The second division of Fournival's Biblionomia was devoted to what Delisle calls "sciences lucratives"--medicine, civil law and canon law.

The third division of the library was theology, i.e. texts and commentaries on the Holy Scriptures and writings of the fathers of the church.

Fournival's Biblionomia is "Perhaps the earliest specific and organized system of book arrangement in a library" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries,"  Stam (ed.) International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 107).

Delisle points out that even though Fournival described the exact content of books in 162 volumes it is difficult to say for sure whether these volumes were ever assembled outside of Fournival's imagination. However, whether it was a real library or an imaginary library Deslisle felt that the Biblionomia was "rich in valuable information for literary history" and he reprinted the Latin text of Biblionomia in Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale II (1874) 518-535.

According to the Wikipedia article on Fournival, 35 manuscripts from his library remain preserved in various libraries, which would indicate that Fournival owned at least a portion of the works that he described in Biblionomia.

Ullman, The Library of the Sorbonne in the Fourteenth Century. The Septicentennial Celebration of the Founding of the Sorbonne College in the University of Paris. [1953] 38-39.

The library of Merton College, Oxford, which calls itself the "the world’s oldest continuously functioning library for university academics and students" traces it origins to this year:

"The provision of books and their storage feature in College records from 1276, when Robert Kilwardby (Archbishop of Canterbury) directed that any books that Fellows brought with them to the College, or acquired during residence, should remain at Merton. The books were to be kept in a chest under three locks, and to be assigned by the Warden and Sub-Warden to the use of the Fellows against a pledge. Later, there were two collections of books: one was kept chained in libraria (the earliest form of chaining dates from 1284), the other was a circulating library. It is not known where the first chained library was located, but repairs were needed in 1338 and it had to be plastered and whitewashed in 1346" (http://www.merton.ox.ac.uk/aboutmerton/library8.shtml)

The library of the Université de Paris, one of the best in Europe, was organized during this year into two collections: the magna libraria in which the most frequently used books were chained and made available for general use for teaching and course work, and the parva libraria which contained duplicates, and more specialized works needed for research. The library included 1017 books at this time.

This information comes from a catalogue of the library written in 1338 which incorporated a catalogue of the library written in 1290, of which only two leaves partially survived as pastedowns.

"The importance of the establishment of a chained library, in the broader picture, is that it established a place where books were not merely kept but where they were used, and used in common. This change at the Sorbonne in 1289-92 is part of a general trend to divide collections, which appears in Europe at the end of the thirteenth and continues through the fourteenth century. Institutions began to divide their collections by causing certain commonly used works to be chained so that these would always be available to their members, while at the same time continuing to provide for the individual needs of their members and outsiders through a circulating collection. The Sorbonne probably provides the earliest clear example of this change taking place" (Rouse & Rouse, "The Early Library of the Sorbonne," Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 364, and 343, 352, reproducing a leaf of the 1290 catalogue as plate 8).

"We have seen that the first catalog of the college [The Sorbonne] was classified; the text of the 1290 catalog provides a full view of this classification system. It was a system common to the intellectual world of the thirteenth century, namely, the Scriptures, glossed and postillated books; Peter Lombard's Sentences, and questions and summas on the Sentences, whole works on the saints and doctors of the Church; questions and distinctions of the master; and whole works of the ancient philosophers, followed by works outside the realm of theology and philosophy — medicine, the quadrivium, jurisprudence and perhaps verancular writings. In this scheme, constructed for theologians, the works are arranged in descending order of their relative authority: Holy scripture, Doctors of the Church, modern masters, and ancient philosophers. This hierarchy of authority was detailed for example by St. Bonaventure: 'Sunt ergo libri sunt sacrae scripturae. . .; secundi libri sunt orignalia sanctorum, tertii, sententiae magistrorum, quarti, doctrinarum mundialium sive philosophorum.' It was only natural that this hierarchy also appeared in the organization of medieval book collections such as that at the Sorbonne.

"It has been suggested, furthermore, on the basis of the first catalog, that the books were grouped by subject and author in armaria similar to those described by Humbert of Romans ca. 1270, and that the classification of the catalog is a reflection of this arrangement. It is impossible, however, to judge on the basis of the catalog alone whether or not it reflects the physical arrrangement of the books themselves. We are fortunate in this instance to have collateral evidence which reveals the arrangement of certain books in the library just after the turn of the century.

"In 1306, Thomas Hibernicus, a fellow of the Sorbonne, unintentionally but effectively preserved a picture of the arrangement of the manuscripts of the major authors in the armaria, in the process of completing his Manipulus florum. This is a collection of extracts from the authorities grouped according to some 265 topics alphabetically arranged— abstinencia, abusio, acceptio, accidia, adiutorium, etc. Under of the the some 265 topics the extracts appear in a set order without significant variation: quotations from Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory, Bernard, Hilary, Chrysostom, Isidore, and so on, concluding with the ancients. At the end of the Manipulus florum Thomas has appended a bibliography of 476 works, each with incipit and explicit, compiled from the Sorbonne's manuscripts. The authors in the bibliography are presented in virtually the same order as the extracts, works of Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, etc. The order preserved here, the order in which Thomas used the books, is apparently that of the grouping of the books in the armaria of the library. The order is virtually the same as the order of authors in the catalogs of 1290 and 1338, originalia Augustine, Ambrosii, Hieronimi, Gregorii, Bernardi, etc. The combined evidence of the 1290 catalog and the Manipulus florum certainly implies, if does not prove, that the organization of the catalog reflects the physical arrangement of the manuscripts in armaria" (Rouse & Rouse, "The Early Library of the Sorbonne," Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 370-72).

On the death of Pope Boniface VIII, the papal library, the eventual basis of the Vatican Library, was moved to Avignon.  During Boniface's papacy the library contained "from 483 to 645 volumes" (Rouse & Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 341).

Oxford Franciscans compiled, on the basis of on-site surveys, the Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum ueterum — a manuscript union catalogue of some 1400 manuscript books in England, Scotland and Wales. It listed the works of 98 authors owned by 189 monastic or cathedral libraries.

"Although none of these libraries is Franciscan, the master list is organized geographically according to the division of Great Britain into the custodiae of the Franciscan order. The three surviving manuscripts of the Registrum date from the beginning of the fifteenth century; it is nevertheless possible to establish from external evidence that the Registrum must date from the first or second decade of the fourteenth century" (Rouse & Rouse, Authentic Witnesses. Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 237-38).

Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum. Edited with an introduction and notes by Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse. The Latin text established by R. A. B. Mynors (1991).

". . . the master promulagated a body of regulations in 1321 'for the benefit of the house [Sorbonne] and the better care of the books,' which defined and rectified the book provisions of the college. . . . In these provisions the masters are bascially concerned with three matters of importance at the time and of significance to the subsequent development of the library: supervision of the loaning and of the general care of the circulating books; enlargement of the collection of chained books; and the making of a new catalog of the whole collection . . . .

"At the head of the list was the stipulation that no book was to be loaned out of the house unless a pledge of greater value, whether book or precious metal, be left in its place in the pledge chest. The responsibility for the circulating books, the libri vagantes of the parva libraria, were placed in the hands of cu stodians of the books who were to elected by the fellows. They were to account for books lost during their tenure, and to exercise strict control over the keys to the parva libraria. The loan register was to be renewed; in it, under the name of each individual borrower, the books which he had were to be precisely described, not only with author and short title, but also with the value of the book and the incipit of its second folio. . . . Certain unbound manuscripts of little worth, such as collections of notes and sermons, were to be disposed of, and the proceeds used to buy books which the library lacked.

"Having insured that adequate control would be maintained over the use and circulation of the unchained books, the statutes secondly insured that the major books would be available at all times. The legislation stipulated that henceforth the best manuscript of each work in the college was to be selected and chained in the libraria communis; all books belonging to the college were subject ot being impounded for chaining, including those which might currently be on loan to individual fellows, because the good of the community outweighs individual privilege . . . .

"The third matter of general significance in the statutes of 1321 was the provision that a new catalog should be made of the whole collection, because many of the books previously owned by the house could not longer be found" (Rouse & Rouse, "The Early Library of the Sorbonne," Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 378-79).

The Library of the Sorbonne, the largest in Europe, contained 1722 volumes of manuscripts in 1328.

Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and Middle Ages (1990) 226.

The Library of Christ Church, Canterbury, contained "1850 volumes" at this time. "The largest monastic collections of this period contained between four and five hundred volumes" (Rouse & Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 341).

The second catalogue of the library of the Sorbonne—the richest library in Christendom—was written in 1338. 

The library, divided into two parts, contained 1722 volumes. The first portion called the communis or magna libraria consisted of 330 volumes chained to the reading desks. The rest of the collection, designated the small library, consisted of 1090 volumes. About 300 volumes relisted from the prior catalogue written in 1290 were designated as missing or in circulation. The writer(s) of the 1338 catalogue

"furnished a large amount of information about each volume. He gives not only the contents, but also the name of the donor, the estimated value, and first words on the second leaf and on the next to the last leaf. This device, intended to help identification of books belonging to the Library and to prevent mutilation, is invaluable to us in trying to identify surviving volumes of the collection. Some professors kept out books on indefinite loan, like their successors today. Such books were appropriately called libri vagantes, 'strays' from the sacred precincts of the Library. It should be said that usually a money deposit was required of borrowers. We even have loan records of the Library during the fourteenth century. The appraisal of each book given in the catalogue was intended to facilitate payment for books lost by borrowers. Chained books were occasonally loaned but only after a faculty vote. There was even a rudimentary inter-library loan system. And that is not all: a union list of books in the monasteries of Paris was made as early as the thirteenth century for the use of the Sorbonnistes. The catalogue of the reference library is in two parts, a shelf-list and a classified catalogue" (Ullman, The Library of the Sorbonne in the Fourteenth Century. The Septicentennial Celebration of the Founding of the Sorbonne College in the University of Paris. [1953] 35-36).

"The collections of the other colleges of the period included no more than three hundred works. . . " (Martin, The History and Power of Writing [1994] 153).

Richard Aungerville, commonly known as Richard de Bury, a Benedictine monk at Durham Cathedral, and treasurer and chancellor of England under Edward III, wrote Philobiblon, perhaps the earliest treatise on the value of preserving neglected or decaying manuscripts, on building a library, and on book collecting.

Philobiblon was published in print for the first time in Cologne, 1473. ISTC No.: ir00191000

The Benedictine monk Henry of Kirkestede, prior of the royal abbey of St. Edmund at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and traditionally known as Boston Burienis, compiled a union catalogue of manuscripts in English libraries entitled Catalogus de libris autenticis et aposcrifis. He named 674 authors and assigned to them about 3900 works.

Richard H. Rouse & Mary A. Rouse, eds., Henry of Kirkested, Catalogus de libris autenticis et aposcrifis (2004).

King Charles V converted the fortress of the Louvre into a royal palace, and established a royal library there. This library eventually became the foundation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The papal library contained 2,059 volumes in 1369.

Rouse & Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (1991) 341.

The new library (still in use) at Merton College, Oxford was finished during this year.  At this time the library at Merton College contained approximately 500 manuscripts.

"At the same time the University of Oxford itself had no more than two or three boxes of books, the ownership of which was disputed by a college, and they were not chained and made accessible till 1412" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.) International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 107).

"The high point of medieval library cataloguing is found in the three-part catalog of Dover Priory in England, made in 1389. Here every volume is listed and every tract identified, the tract's position within a volume entered by leaf number, the opening words (the incipit) of each quoted, and the whole rendered accessible by a shelf list and an alphabetical index of all the works in the library" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.) International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 107).

The Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry written and illuminated by Herman, Paul and Johan Limbourg, and preserved in The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes an image of St. Catherine in her study with a most elegant revolving bookstand, on which we can see eight volumes. 

This is one of the more distinctive depictions of library furnishings in a medieval manuscript.

Artists Herman, Paul, and Johan Limbourg, working for their patron, Jean, Duc de Berry created the paintings for the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. It is a very richly decorated book of hours containing prayers to be said by the lay faithful at each of the canonical hours of the day.

This book, with its spectacular miniature paintings, has been called the most important illuminated manuscript of the late 15th century, and "le roi des manuscrits enluminés." It remained unfinished at the death of the Duc de Berry in 1416; the artists died the same year, leading to the suggestion that the deaths of artists and patron were caused by plague.

"The Très Riches Heures consists of 416 pages, including 131 with large miniatures and many more with border decorations or historiated initials, that are among the high points of International Gothic painting in spite of their small size. There are 300 decorated capital letters. The book was worked on, over a period of nearly a century, in three stages, led by the Limbourg brothers, Barthélemy van Eyck, and Jean Colombe. . . .

"The writing, illuminated capitals, border decorations, and gilding was most likely executed by other specialists who remain mostly unknown. The Limbourg brothers left the book unfinished and unbound at their, and the Duke's, death in 1416. The work passed to the Duke's cousin, the royal art lover and amateur painter René d'Anjou, who had an unidentified artist, the so-called Master of the Shadows, who was probably Barthélemy van Eyck, work on the book in the 1440s. Forty years later Charles I, Duc de Savoie commissioned Jean Colombe to finish the paintings between 1485 and 1489.The paintings of Colombe are easy to distinguish, as are those of the Master of the Shadows (Barthélemy d'Eyck)" (Wikipedia article on the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, accessed 11-22-2008).

The manuscript is preserved in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.

John of Valois, the Magnificent, "Jean, Duc de Berry", Duke of Berry and Auvergne and Count of Poitiers and Montpensier, has been called the greatest patron of illuminated manuscripts of his age. His library was probably the most artistically significant of all private libraries collected during the late Middle Ages. The third son of King John II of France and Bonne of Luxemburg; his brothers were Charles V, King of France, Louis I of Anjou, King of Naples and Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.

Jean maintained numerous estates, including vast collections of art works of many kinds. He also died heavily in debt. Even though his library was much smaller in number than other collections it is far better preserved and accounted for since, for example, items with precious metal may have been melted down, and gemstones dispersed.

Numerous inventories of Jean's library were preserved, the earliest from 1402. Ironically perhaps, because of the many debts that Jean left at his death, aspects of his estate had to be liquidated, and the inventory of his books in the Chateau de Mehun prepared for Jean Bourne, "contrôleur de sa maison," was preserved, including appraised values of the 162 manuscripts, the greatest of which were recognized to be of immense monetary value at the time. This inventory, preserved at the Bibliothèque de Saint-Geneviève, Paris, was published completely for the first time by as La librairie de Jean, duc de Berry, au château de Mehun-sur-Yèvre, 1416, publiée en entier pour la première fois des notes by Hiver de Beauvoir (1860). 

The most comprehensive study of Jean, Duc de Berry's library, which collated all extant inventories and listed a total of 297 manuscripts with their references in the manuscript inventories, was by Léopold Delisle. In this comprehensive study Delisle included an index by author and subject, and provided an inventory of extant manuscripts from the Duc de Berry library in French and foreign libraries. This was Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V. Partie II. Inventaire des livres ayant appartenu aux rois Charles V et Charles VI et à Jean, Duc de Berry (1907). The study of the library of Jean, Duc de Berry, appears on pp. 217-331.

When Delisle published nearly all of the Berry manuscripts were in institutional collections, primarily in France. Manuscripts remaining in private hands included some the most important: "Second morceau des Heures dites de Turin", and "Heures de Pucelle" in the collection of Madam la baronne Adolphe de Rothschild, now at The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Les Belles Heures du duc de Berry" in the collection of M. le baron Edmond de Rothschild, and now also at the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The library of Sir Thomas Phillipps contained "Débat sur le roman de la Rose," and Henry Yates Thompson owned "Tomes I et II du Miroir historial, en français", "La Bible historiale donnée par le duc de Berry à Jean Harpedenne", and "Le second volume de la Cité de Dieu en français."

Longnon & Cazelles, The Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duc of Berry (1969) reproduces the manuscript in facsimile with an introduction that includes information concerning the history of the ownership of the manuscript before it was deposited in the Musée Conde by Henri d'Orleans, Duc d'Aumale in 1897.

Elector Louis III, Count Palatine of the Rhine, founded the Stiftsbibliothek in the Heidelberg Heiliggeistkirche, a church which has good light for reading.  This was the origin of the Bibliotheca Palatina.

Foundation of the library at the Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence by Cosimo de' Medici, designed by Michelozzo.

This has often been considered the first "public library" in Renaissance Europe.

"The ideal of a public library was one treasured by humanists and their patrons. Yet the term public library meant something very different to Renaissance scholars than it does today. It did not designate a library open to all comers. First and oldest of the available meanings of the term public library was that of a common library. Many libraries and colleges of the late medieval period had public libraries in this sense, usually meaning a collection for the collective use of the institutional community. Second was the notion of a library that served the public utility or was used for the public benefit, largely in a political sense; an archive, for example, or a library meant to support the jurisdictional and diplomatic activities of the ecclesiastical or secular political body it served. Third, a library might be in a public building or within the public space of a house or palace.

"Perhaps the best early expression of the modern concept of the public library is to be found in the establishment of the San Marco library, the first public library at Florence. The foundation of the library was Niccoli's collection. Niccoli's intentions were for his library to be brought 'to the common good, to the public service, to a place open to all, so that all eager for education might be able to harvest from it as from a fertile field the rich fruit of learning.' Eventually, the executors of Niccoli's estate permitted Cosimo de' Medici to place the books in the library of the Dominican convent of San Marco, which Cosimo was then on the verge of constructing. The library opened in 1444 and was the first public library in Florence, containing 400 volumes laid out across 64 benches. The San Marco library embodied three different Renaissance concepts of a public library: It was the common library of the Dominican convent in which it was housed, a collection made available to a circle of humanist investigators, and an institution supported by the public patronage of an eminent ruler" (P. Nelles, "Renaissance Libraries", Stam, (ed.) International Dictionary of Library History [2001] 151).

The Biblioteca Malatestiana (Biblioteca Malatesta Novello) was commissioned by Malatesta Novello, Lord of Cesena and brother of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, in Cesena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. 

The library which Novello founded was the first European civic library, belonging to the commune, and open to everyone.

The Malatestiana Library, which I visited in September 2010, is the only monastic humanist library of which the structure, fittings and original collection of codices in their original bindings chained to the original desks, have survived almost completely intact. The main doorway was the work of the early Italian Renaissance sculptor Agostino di Duccio. The splendid walnut door carved by Cristoforo da San Giovanni in Persiceto was installed in 1454.

"The fittings are composed of 58 desks, with coat of arms at the sides. The light comes in through the 44 Venetian style windows, which were perfectly designed for reading. Inside are conserved 340 precious codexes. The 340 books concern: religion (among them, the oldest codex, an Etimologie by St Isidoro), Greek and Latin classics, sciences and medicine" (Wikipedia article on Malatestiana Library, accessed 10-30-2010).

To equip his library Malatesta Novello commissioned certain scribes to produce copies of many of the standard classics. These scribes included Jean-Epinal, Jacopo della Pergola, Brother Francesco di Bartholomeo, and Mathias Kuler. After Malatesta's death the library remained static--fixed in time.

The survival of the original library and its fixtures was probably due to the way that Malatesta Novello entrusted its care to both the Franciscans and the city of Cesena. The Franciscans originally had the idea for the library and received permission from Pope Eugene IV in 1445, and began construction in 1447. In 1450 Malatesta Novello adopted the friars' project and constructed his own library in their monastery. The inspiration for the architecture was the library of the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence, designed by Michelozzo, which had been founded in 1444.

From 1797 to 1804 the Franciscan monastery associated with the library was used as a dormitory for Napoleonic troops occupying the city, and the library itself was stripped of its furnishings and also used as a dormitory. After Napoleon's forces left the library was restored to its original medieval condition and regained its original collections, less two incunabula which were kept by the French: the Ortographia dictionum of Tortelli and Cosmographia of Ptolemy.

Among the many distinguishing characteristics of the decoration of this library are the numerous inscriptions created at the time of its completion stating in Latin that the library was the gift of Malatesto Novello. On 1812 the remains of Malatesta Novello were moved from the church of St. Francis, already in poor condition and destined to destruction, to the middle of the back wall of the library, accompanied by this marble epigraph:

"D (IS) M (ANIBUS) S (ACRUM) / principum / Malatesta (UM) / SENIORIS NOVELLIQUE / CINERES Quosa DOMI / ET Foris / Clarissa (IMA) VIRTUS / CAEL DICAVIT."  

Clark, The Care of Books (1902) 193-98.

With a Brief "pro communi doctorum virorum commodo" (to facilitate the research of scholars) Pope Nicholas V establishes the Vatican Library by combining some 350 Greek, Latin and Hebrew codices inherited from his predecessors with his own collection and extensive acquisitions.

The Vatican Library, as originally established by Nicholas V, included manuscripts from the Imperial library of Constantinople, rescued or plundered before that library was burned in 1204 when Constantinople was sacked during the Fourth Crusade.

On his death in 1474 Giovanni di Marco da Rimini, physician to Malatesta Novello,  bequeathed his library of medical manuscripts to the recently established Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena, Italy. 

Giovanni's library, which was preserved along with the rest of the Bibliotheca Malatestiana, may be the earliest physician's library to have survived intact. The library contains numerous spectacular codices of the expected standard European and Arab scientific and medical authorities, several dating from the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, and one (S. XXI.5) dating from the 8th century. Some are finely illuminated. That Giovanni owned several manuscripts from prior centuries suggests that he collected books not only for reference but also out of humanistic and antiquarian interest.

An excellent annotated catalogue of this library was published in large 4to format: Manfron (ed.) La Biblioteca di un Medico del Quattrocento. I codici di Giovanni di Marco da Rimini nella Bibliotheca Malatestiana (1998).  The catalogue contains numerous fine color plates.

Under Pope Sixtus IV specific quarters were established to house the volumes of manuscripts and the archives that formed the nucleus of the Vatican Library. In 1475 the library prepared the first catalogue of its holdings.

"When its first librarian, Bartolomeo Platina, produced a listing in 1481, the library held over 3,500 items, making it by far the largest in the Western world" (Wikipedia article on Vatican Library accessed 09-16-2010).

Among his other accomplishments, Sixtus IV built the Sistine Chapel. 

In 2013 I acquired a broadside issued by the Press of the Woolly Whale, New York, in 1939.  This reprinted in a rather elegant manner the Rules of the Library Made in the second year of Richard III and the third of the Wardenship of Warden [Richard] Fitzjames, November 3, 1484. The rules were translated from the Latin register of Merton College, Oxford. The 1939 broadside stated that "Every member of the college was required to take an oath on admission, that he would obey these rules."

I. When admitted to the use of the books contained in the Library, you shall, so far as the frailty of man permits, do no damage to any book, either by handling it roughly or by tearing out its pages, but you should handle the books in a seemly fashion and keep them from all harm.

II. Likewise you shall neither privily nor openly remove any book which is confined to the Library for the use of members of the college. If you know of any book or books so removed by any person, you shall, so soon as you fairly can after the offense has been committed and become known to you Expose the offender by giving his name to the Warden, or in his absence, to the Sub-Warden.

III. Likewise, if you happen to bring Visitors to the Library you shall so far as in you lies see to it that the college does not, from the introduction of such visitors, suffer any loss by the theft of books or parts of them.

IV. Likewise, if you happen to lose the Key of the Library, and cannot find it again within four-and-twenty hours, you shall then without further delay, report the loss of the Key to the Warden, or, in his absence, to the Sub-Warden.

Ferdinand Columbus, (Italian: Fernando Colombo, Spanish: Fernando Colón; 15 August? 1488 - 1539) the second son of Christopher Columbus, returned from the New World, and collected one of the largest private libraries of the sixteenth century. This library, La Bibliotheca Colombina, included about 15,000 volumes, of which about 7000 survive today, including 1194 books printed before 1501.

Ferdinand Columbus's library, which also includes a number of volumes from the personal library of Christopher Columbus, is preserved in the Cathedral of the City of Seville in Andalucia. Among the volumes in La Bibliotheca Colombina is the manuscript catalogue of Ferdinand's print collection. According to Mark McDonald, editor of this manuscript catalogue listing 3200 sheets (including 390 prints by Albrecht Dürer), no print collection from the fifteenth or sixteenth century has survived, and the manuscript catalogue of Columbus' print collection is the only record of such a print collection that has survived. The catalogue is notable for its organizational scheme. McDonald (editor) The Print Collection of Ferndinand Columbus 1488-1539: A Renaissance Collector in Seville (2004).

In a formal process called Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry VIII disbanded monastic communities in England, Wales and Ireland and confiscated their property. Henry was given the authority to do this by the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which made him Supreme Head of the Church in England, and by the First Suppression Act (1536) and the Second Suppression Act (1539).

"Along with the destruction of the monasteries, some of them many hundreds of years old, the related destruction of the monastic libraries was perhaps the greatest cultural loss caused by the English Reformation. Worcester Priory (now Worcester Cathedral) had 600 books at the time of the dissolution. Only six of them are known to have survived intact to the present day. At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three known survivors. Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload. The antiquarian John Leland was commissioned by the King to rescue items of particular interest (especially manuscript sources of Old English history), and other collections were made by private individuals; notably Matthew Parker. Nevertheless much was lost, especially manuscript books of English church music, none of which had then been printed.

A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous mansyons, resrved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes, some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers.

-John Bale, 1549

(Wikipedia article on Dissolution of the Monasteries, accessed 11-25-2008)

Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimbaldo, court portraitist to Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague, painted The Librarian as part of a series of portraits in which a collection of objects— in this case books— form a recognizable likeness in semi-human form of the portrait subject. In The Librarian, Arcimboldo used objects that signified the book culture at that time. The animal tails, which became the beard of the portrait, were used as dusters

This painting, preserved at Skokloster Castle, Sweden, is, like others from Arcimbaldo's series, often interpretted as an expression of the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre. 

"The bizarre works of Arcimboldo, especially his multiple images, were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí. The exhibition entitled “The Arcimboldo Effect” at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1987) included numerous 'double meaning' paintings. Arcimboldo's influence can also be seen in the work of Shigeo Fukuda, István Orosz, Octavio Ocampo, and Sandro del Prete, as well as the films of Jan Švankmajer" (Wikipedia article on Giuseppe Arcimboldo, accessed 01-02-2011).

Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker secured a license from Queen Elizabeth to seek out "auncient records or monuments" from the former libraries of the monasteries suppressed by Henry VIII, and from old cathedral priories converted to the use of the Church of England.

"He thus had first choice of many hundreds of manuscripts of the very highest importance. This was the earliest major antiquarian collection ever asssembled in England, long before those of Thomas Bodley (1545-1613) or Robert Cotton (1571-1631), which became the foundations of the libraries of the Bodleian in Oxford and, eventually, the British Library in London" (de Hamel, The Parker Library: Treasures from the Collection [2000] 8).

In 157 the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (The Laurentian Library of the Medici) in Florence, Italy, designed by Michelangelo, was opened to the public.

The catalogue of the private library of the Augsburg physician, Jeremias Martius (c. 1535-1585,) may be the first printed catalogue of any library.

In 1574 Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker donated his library of about 480 manuscripts and about 1000 printed books to the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

"He was an avid book collector, salvaging medieval manuscripts dispersed at the dissolution of the monasteries; he was particularly keen to preserve materials relating to Anglo-Saxon England, motivated by his search for evidence of an ancient English-speaking Church independent of Rome. The extraordinary collection of documents that resulted from his efforts is still housed at Corpus Christi College, and consists of items spanning from the sixth-century Gospels of St. Augustine to sixteenth century records relating to the English Reformation.

"The Parker Library's holdings of Old English texts accounts for nearly a quarter of all extant manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon, including the earliest copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 890), the Old English Bede and King Alfred´s translation of Gregory the Great´s Pastoral Care. The Parker Library also contains key Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts ranging from the Ancrene Wisse and the Brut Chronicle to one of the finest copies of Chaucer´s Troilus and Criseyde. Other subjects represented in the collection are music, medieval travelogues and maps, bestiaries, royal ceremonies, historical chronicles and Bibles. The Parker Library holds a magnificent collection of English illuminated manuscripts, such as the Bury and Dover Bibles (c. 1135 and c. 1150) and the Chronica maiora by Matthew Paris (c. 1230-50)" (Parker Library on the Web [Beta] accessed 11-27-2008).

Hieronymous Wolf, humanist, and librarian to Johann Jakob Fugger, published Catalogus Graecorum librorum manu scriptorum Augustanae bibliothecae. Wolf's slim pamphlet of only 6 leaves listed 126 Greek manuscripts presented by Fugger to the City Library of Augsburg, Fugger's native city. It may be considered the first printed catalogue of a portion of a public library.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 25.

French scholar and bibliographer François Grudé de la Croix du Maine published in Paris Premier Volume de la Bibliothèque du Sieur de la Croix-Du-Maine. Qui est un catalogue général de toutes sortes d'Autherus, qui on escrit en François depuis cinq cents ans & plus.

This was the first French national bibliography.

"The authors, numbering three thousand, as the title states, are arranged in the aphabetical order of their first names, but a list of their surnames is given in the preliminaries. Their short biographies are followed by the lists of their works and bibliographical data, as far as known to the author. Vol. II, a subject index, and vol. III, Latin works by French authors never appeared as Grudé was assassinated [as a Protestant sympathizer in 1592.

"The work contains an auto-bibliography of several hundred works on French history of which none has survived, earning Grudé in some quarters the title of impostor" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 29).

Grudé also included a proposal for a Royal National Library with a number classification system similar to the modern decimal classification system. On p. 511 of his book there is a woodcut which may be the earliest printed representation of a bookcase.

Pope Sixtus V commissioned the Swiss-born Italian architect Domenico Fontana to construct a new building for the Vatican Library.  

The library building is still in use today, and contains the famous Sistene Hall.

"This noble hall—probably the most splendid apartment ever assigned to library-purposes—spans the Cortile del Belvedere from east to west, and is entered at each ed from the galleries connecting the Belvedere with the Vatican palace. It is 184 fee long, and 57 feet wide, divided into two by six piers, on which rests simple quadripartite vaults. The north and south walls are each pierced with seven large windows. No books are visible. They are contained in plain wooden presses 7 feet high and 2 feet deep, set round the piers, and against the walls between the windows. . . .(Clark, The Care of Books [1902] 49-50). 

In 1588 English politician Sir Robert Bruce Cotton began collecting original manuscripts, an activity which he continued until his death in 1631. One of the foundations of the British Museum since 1753, and hence of the British Library, Cotton's library of 958 manuscripts has been called the most important collection of manuscripts ever assembled in Britain by a private individual. Competing for this designation would, of course, be Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker's library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Parker, who began collecting in 1568, preceded Cotton in his collecting by a generation. The Sir Thomas Phillipps library, though formed in the nineteenth century and dispersed, was many times larger than either Cotton's or Parker's libraries, and also needs to be considered for the designation. 

Among Cotton's many treasures were the Lindisfarne Gospels, two of the contemporary exemplifications of Magna Carta, and the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf.  The first published catalogue of the Cottonian Library was Thomas Smith's Catalogus Librorum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Cottonianae, a substantial folio volume including a life of Robert Cotton and a history of the library published in Oxford in 1696. 

On October 23, 1731 Cotton's library suffered very significant damage in a fire where it was stored at Ashburnham House in London. Of its 958 manuscripts 114 were "lost, burnt or intirely spoiled" and another 98 damaged enough to be considered defective. The Wikipedia article on Ashburnham House states  

"a contemporary records the librarian, Dr. Bentley, leaping from a window with the priceless Codex Alexandrinus under one arm. The manuscript of Beowulf was damaged, and reported in 'The Gentleman's Magazine.' "  

An expert committee was formed to investigate the cause of the fire and assess the damage. This resulted in A Report from the Committee appointed to view the Cottonian Library and such of the Publick Records of this Kingdom as they think proper and to Report to the House the Condition thereof together with what they shall judge fit to be done for the better Reception Preservation and more convenient Use of the same (London, 1732). David Casley (1681/2-1754), deputy librarian of both the Royal and Cottonian collections, and a member of this committee, compiled the list of damaged and destroyed Cotton manuscripts, which was printed in an appendix to the committee's report. Casley described a number of manuscripts as "burnt to a crust." The Committee was also "empowered to investigate the state of the public records as a whole. They found that for the most part they were 'in great Confusion and Disorder' and much in need of care and attention" (Miller, That Noble Cabinet, 36).

The 1732 report also contained an appendix consisting of "A Narrative of the Fire. . . and of the Methods used for preserving and recovering the Manuscripts of the Royal and Cottonian libraries,"  compiled by the Reverend William Whiston the younger, the clerk in charge of the records kept in the Chapter House at Westminster, another notorious firetrap. Almost immediately after the fire attempts at restoration or stabilization of some of the damaged manuscripts was undertaken, mostly by inexperienced workers under the supervision of members of the committee, using whatever methods were available, and thus potentially damaging as much as preserving what remained.  

In April 1837, palaeographer Frederic Madden, Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, was shown a garret of the old museum building which contained a large number of burnt and damaged fragments and vellum codices. Madden immediately identified these as part of the Cottonan Library. During his tenure as Keeper of MSS, Madden undertook extensive conservation work on the Cottonian manuscripts, often in the face of opposition from the Museum’s board, who deemed the enterprise prohibitively expensive.

In collaboration with the bookbinder Henry Gough, Madden developed a conservation strategy that restored even the most badly damaged fragments and manuscripts to a usable state. Vellum sheets were cleaned and flattened and mounted in paper frames. Where possible, they were rebound in their original codices. Madden also carried out conservation work on the rest of the Cottonian Library. By 1845 the conservation work was largely complete, though Madden was to suffer one more setback when a fire broke out in the Museum bindery, destroying some additional manuscripts in the Cottonian Library.  The process of restoring and conserving these precious manuscripts, which continues to this day, was studied extensively by Andrew Prescott in " 'Their Present Miserable State of Cremation' : the Restoration of the Cotton Library," Sir Robert Cotton as Collector" Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier and His Legacy, edited by C. J. Wright (1997) 391-454. This paper, and its 357 footnotes, was available online in April 2012.

"The Cottonian Library was the richest private collection of manuscripts ever amassed; of secular libraries it outranked the Royal library, the collections of the Inns of Court and the College of Arms; Cotton's house near the Palace of Westminster became the meeting-place of the Society of Antiquaries and of all the eminent scholars of England; it was eventually donated to the nation by Cotton's grandson and now resides at the British Library.

"The physical arrangement of Cotton's Library continues to be reflected in citations to manuscripts once in his possession. His library was housed in a room 26 feet (7.9 m) long by six feet wide filled with bookpresses, each with the bust of a figure from classical antiquity on top. Counterclockwise, these are catalogued as Julius (i.e., Julius Caesar), Augustus, Cleopatra, Faustina, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. (Domitian had only one shelf, perhaps because it was over the door.) Manuscripts are now designated by library, bookpress, and number: for example, the manuscript of Beowulf is designated Cotton Vitellius A.xv, and the manuscript of Pearl is Cotton Nero A.x" (Wikipedia article on Sir Robert Cotton, accessed 11-22-2008).

The most useful version of Smith's 1696 catalogue of Cotton's library, published in somewhat reduced format, was the offset reprint done from Sir Robert Harley's copy, annotated by his librarian Humfrey Wanley, together with documents relating to the fire of 1731. This annotated edition included translations into English of the Latin essays on the life of Robert Cotton and the history of the library. Edited by C.G.C. Tite, it was published in 1984. See also Tite, The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton's Library. Formation, Cataloguing, Use (2003). 

Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton 1586-1631. History and Politics in Early Modern England (1979).

Having been founded in 1587, Leiden University Library issued the first printed catalogue of its holdings: Nomenclator autorum omnium, quorum libri vel manuscripti, vel typis expressi exstant in Bibliotheca Academiae Lugduno-Batavae (List of all Authors whose Books, Whether Manuscript or Printed, are Available in Leiden University Library).

This was the first published catalogue of any institutional library.

In 1602 Southern-Netherlandish (Belgian) philologist and humanist Joose Lips or Josse Lips, best-known through the Latinization of his name, Justus Lipsius, published a pamphlet of 34pp. entitled De bibliothecis syntagma in Antwerp at the Plantin-Moretus Press. "Based primarily on the writings of classical Greek and Roman authors, it surveyed the libraries of antiquity by describing their locations, buildings, storage methods, and, to a small extent, their contents" (Walker, Justus Lipsius and the Historiography of Libraries," Libraries & Culture XXVI [1991] 49-65.)

The Bodleian Library at Oxford opened to the "public" with a collection of 2000 books assembled by Thomas Bodley to replace the library that had been donated to the Divinity School by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (brother of Henry V), but which had been dispersed in the 16th century.

Depending on how the concept of "public library" is defined, the Bodleian is probably the first public library in England, and one of the first "public" libraries in Europe.

Cardinal Federico Borromeo founded the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Depending on how "public library" is defined, the Ambrosiana was possibly the the second public library in Europe, after the Bodleian at Oxford. However, the Ambrosiana was preceded in Italy by the library at the Domincan convent of San Marco (1444) and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (1571), both of which were characterized as "public" libraries when they were founded. Thus, there may be some uncertainly as to which library was actually the first "public" library in Europe.

To build up the Ambrosiana's collections Cardinal Borromeo's agents scoured Western Europe, and even Greece and Syria for books and manuscripts. In 1606 they acquired the complete manuscripts of the Benedictine monastery of Bobbio, founded in 614, and the library of the Paduan Vincenzo Pinelli, whose more than 800 manuscripts filled 70 cases when they were sent to Milan, and included the famous extremely early illuminated miniatures of the Iliad, the Ilias Ambrosiana.

"During Cardinal Borromeo's sojourns in Rome, 1585–95 and 1597–1601, he envisioned developing this library in Milan as one open to scholars and that would serve as a bulwark of Catholic scholarship against the treatises issuing from Protestant presses. To house the cardinal's 15,000 manuscripts and twice that many printed books, Construction began in 1603 under designs and direction of Lelio Buzzi and Francesco Maria Richini. When its first reading room, the Sala Fredericiana, opened to the public, December 8, 1609, it was, after the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the second public library in Europe. One innovation was that its books were housed in cases ranged along the walls, rather than chained to reading tables, a practice seen still today in the Laurentian Library of Florence. A printing press was attached to the library, and a school for instruction in the classical languages.

"Cardinal Borromeo gave his collection of paintings and drawings to the library too. Shortly after the cardinal's death his library acquired twelve manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci, including the Codex Atlanticus. . . ." (Wikipedia article on the Biblioteca Ambroisiana).

Bookshelves constructed in the Arts End of  Duke Humfrey's Library in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, designed for smaller books to be shelved upright rather than folios laid flat, were installed at this time. They are among the earliest surviving bookshelves of this type. 

Wormald & Wright, The English Library before 1700 (1958) 237, and frontispiece.

Bookseller and publisher Andries Cloucq published a series of four large prints depicting the main buildings and halls of Leiden University: the anatomy theatre, the library, the botanical garden and the fencing school. The prints were engraved by Willem van Swanenburg after drawings by the Leiden artist Jan Cornelis van't Woudt (Woudanus). 

Most relevant to From Cave Paintings to the Internet is the famous print of the interior of the library, of which the Wikipedia reproduces a hand-colored copy from a version published in Stedboeck der Nederlanden (Amsterdam: Willem Blaeu, 1649). 

As Clark writes in The Care of Books (1902) 164:

"The bookcases were evidently contrived with the view of getting the largest number possible into the room. Each contained a single row of books, chained to a bar in front of the shelf; and, also for the purpose of saving the space usually occupied by a seat, readers were obliged to consult them standing. There are eleven bookcases on each sie of the room, each containing from 40 to 48 volumes. At the end of the room are two cupboards, probably for manuscripts; and to the right of the spectator is a third press marked Legatum Josephi Scaligeri. He died in January, 1609. Further, as an illustration of the usual appliances for study found in libraries at this period, and often mentioned in catalogues and account-books, I should draw attention to the globes and maps."

The working library of Hereford Cathedral in England originated in the eleventh century. The chained library at the cathedral, containing 229 medieval manuscripts, remains the largest historic chained library in the world, with all its rods, chains and locks intact. It has been preserved in the form in which it was maintained from 1611 to 1841.

Though many books in the Bibliotheca Palatina of Heidelberg were "torn or dispersed into private hands" when troops under Maximilian I of Bavaria sacked Heidelberg during the Thirty Years War, Maximilian decided to confiscate the remaining manuscripts as war booty and presented them to Pope Gregory XV as "a sign of his loyalty and esteem." 196 cases containing about 3500 manuscripts were transported across the Alps to Rome on 200 mules under the supervision of scholar Leo Allatius.

In 1623 these books were incorporated into the Vatican Library with a Latin bookplate which may be translated as "I am from the library captured in Heidelberg and sent as spoils of war to Pope Gregory XV by Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, etc., . . . A.D. 1623." 

While a medical student Gabriel Naudé published in Paris one of the earliest works on book-collecting and librarianship: Avis pour dresser une bibliothèque.

Naude's book, written while he served as librarian for Henri de Mesme, Président à Mortier in the Parliament of Paris and councillor to Louis XIII, contained an early mention of the goal of creating a public universal library:

"And therefore I shall ever think it extremely necessary, to collect for this purpose all sorts of books, (under such precautions, yet, as I shall establish) seeing a Library which is erected for the public benefit, ought to be universal; but which it can never be, unlesse it comprehend all the principal authors, that have written upon the great diversity of particular subjects, and chiefly upon all the arts and sciences; [. . .] For certainly there is nothing which renders a Library more recommendable, then when every man findes in it that which he is in search of . . . ."

When Naudé wrote only three "public" libraries existed in Europe: the Bodleian Library opened at Oxford in 1602, the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana founded in Milan by Cardinal Federigo in 1609, and the Bibliotheca Angelica, opened for public service in Rome, also in 1609.

Naudé's work was first translated into English by John Evelyn, and published as Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library in 1651.

Clarke, Gabriel Naudé 1600-1653 (1970).

The Rev. John Norton brought to Plymouth, Massachusetts a copy of the Venice 1491 edition of St. Augustine's Opuscula.

This is the earliest documented 15th century book present in North America. It is preserved in the Boston Public Library.

Harvard College, the first institution of higher learning in the United States, was established at Cambridge, Massachusetts by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and named for its first benefactor, John Harvard.  Harvard was a minister who left a few hundred books and half his estate to the new institution.

Scottish minister and writer, John Dury, Keeper of the Royal Library from the death of Charles I until the Restoration, wrote letters on library and educational reform to his friend, the German-British polymath and educational reformer Samuel Hartlib. Hartlib published them in London as The Reformed Librarie Keeper in 1650. This was, among other things, the first English book on “library economy.”

"One of the ways in which both Dury and Hartlib wished to promote educational reform and further knowledge was by exploiting the facilities of public libraries in London, Oxford, and Cambridge more efficiently. Dury expressed the hope that the work of the librarian might be as ‘a factor and trader for helpes to learning, a treasurer to keep them and a dispenser to apply them to use, or to see them well used, or at least not abused’ (Turnbull, p.257). The Reformed Librarie-Keeper printed various proposals for the organization and use of libraries, which Dury had originally advanced in 1646. It was published together with Dury’s plans for a reformed school in 1650. In that year, Dury was appointed keeper of the library of St James’s Palace (formerly the King’s Library), which was in a state of disorder. He installed new bookcases and urged that the trustees for the selling of the late king’s goods should draw up an inventory of the books and medals, both measures being intended to make the library usable to the public. A few years later, Dury and Henry Langley unsuccessfully proposed Hartlib for the post of Bodley’s Librarian.  

"As storehouses of learning, in which great strides had already been made to establish accurate classifications, libraries had the potential to be ideal embodiments of the Ark. But the poorly-funded libraries of interregnum England were too chaotic in organization and too inaccessible for ordinary readers to be able to fulfil the role in which Dury and Hartlib had cast them" (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, "Harlib Circle," http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/gatt/catalog.php?num=67, accessed 01-30-2012).

"In Dury's first letter we learn that the library keeper's only responsibility was to safeguard the collection. To do this, a man (note: not a woman) did not need to be particularly well educated. The pay was low, commensurate with the skill-level required for the job. Dury describes the service provided by "factors and traders," educated men who profited by traveling throughout Europe searching for books suitable for various collections. Dury faults that system because he believed that the "factors and traders" were more interested in profit-making than in learning. (He then kindly defends these men by pointing out that, after all, they have to make a living.) His idea was to enhance the job of the library-keeper to include the role of the trader. In order to do this, the position of library-keeper would have to provide enough pay to attract educated men. If the library wanted men who were broadly educated and interested in the advancement of learning, Dury suggested the pay scale, which then ranged between 50 and 100 Pounds a year, be raised to 200 Pounds. He recommended that potential employees be tested in order to prove they are familiar enough with the various disciplines of the day to accurately maintain the library catalog.  

"Dury felt that having trained library keepers was essential if libraries were to be made open to the public. The library-keeper's job would be extended to include recommending and annually defending additions to the collection before the faculty of the University. The library-keeper was to correspond with experts in every science throughout Europe (expenses to be paid by the University). The library keeper was also to be the reference person regarding the collection, in order to assist scholars. In addition he was to continue the role of safeguarding the collection, which, in a public library, meant overseeing collection use and maintaining the library catalog.  

"Dury notes that the catalog would need to be created first, however. He suggested that the catalog be arranged by subject matter, then divided by language. The catalog he had in mind would also contain a pointer to the physical position of the book within the library. That system would be designed well enough to allow for the growth of the collection. Moreover, an annual list of additions to the collection would be printed. The entire catalog would be printed and circulated to other libraries in Europe every three years (or more often if the library grows faster than expected). He also proposed that the University keep books that the library has acquired, by gifts or purchase, even if the faculty couldn't use them, as; "there is seldom any book that does not contain something useful." He suggested keeping them in a separate collection and creating a list that was indexed by subject and arranged alphabetically by author.

"Dury's second letter offers an argument to be used in defending the cost of establishing his proposed library before the British Parliament, which he thought should supply the necessary funding. He bases his argument on Christian moral grounds, reminding us that in his day the separation of church and state was not a popular idea. Dury saw the library as a place that would nourish the spirits of men. He criticizes private libraries as serving those that "pride themselves in the possession of that which others have not," men who "covetously obstruct the fountains of life and comfort." He complains that this "dilates the light of knowledge and the love of the grace and goodness in the hearts of all men." He argues that library should be "communicating all good things freely to others." He goes on to argue that the university library, by proving useful to scholars in other nations, would encourage them to adopt similar policies for their own libraries, thus bringing honor to England. Finally, he warns that if the library is administered without relation to Christ's teachings, the endeavor is likely to lead to strife, confusion, and pride"(http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~chip/projects/timeline/1651robins.html, accessed 01-30-2012).

Michel de Marolles published in Paris at the press of F. Leonard Catalogue de livres d’estampes et de figures en taille douce. Marolles's work was the first book on print collecting. Marolles arranged his collection of 123,400 engravings into schools, and in his preliminary and concluding essays he illuminated market conditions and the methods and tastes of fellow collectors. He also documented the relative weighting, in acquisition decisions, of physical condition, rarity, provenance, artist, engraver and the beauty of the image. As a result of this book Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, purchased Marolles' print collection, and it became the basis of the Cabinét des Estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Joachim Johann Mader published De bibliothecis atque archivis virorum clarissimorum libelli et commentationes. Cum praefatione  de scriptis et bibliothecis antediluvianis. This was the first anthology of texts on libraries, archives and "library science".

"The work is prefaced by his account of antediluvian libraries—those of Adam, Noah, etc., and then follow several monographs from such authors as Justus Lipsius, Franz Schott, Fulvio Orsino, Michael Neander, and pieces on the Vatican and Escorial libraries"  (Catalogus Catalogorum [Predominantly Post-1900]. Part III of the Private Library of Hans P. Kraus. Catalogue 190, H. P. Kraus [company,] no. 538).

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary:

"So took up my wife and home, there I to the office, and thence with Sympson, the joyner home to put together the press he hath brought me for my books this day, which pleases me exceedingly."

and a few days later he wrote:

"and then comes Sympson to set up my other new presses for my books, and so he and I fell into the furnishing of my new closett ... so I think it will be as noble a closett as any man hath."

"The surviving bookcases have paired glazed doors each in 21 small panes, over a low section, also with glazed panes, made to hold large folio volumes. The door of the lower section slide to the side like a sash window, probably Pepys' own invention. The base moldings and cornices are finely and robustly carved with acanthus leaf. Such tall bookcases with doors glazed like paned windows, were a contemporary innovation, but Pepys was alert and curious and well-connected in London, and there is no reason to think his "book-presses" were the very first with glass-paned doors. Pepys began with three or four and kept adding to them until he had twelve" (Wikipedia article on Sympson the joyner, accessed 02-18-2009).

Wormald & Wright, The English Library before 1700 (1958) illustrate as plate 2 a drawing preserved in the Pepysian Library showing how the bookcases were originally arranged in Pepys' house in York Buildings before they were moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge.

As a result of the burning of his home and the destruction of his library, which included numerous unpublished manuscripts on a wide range of subjects, Danish physician and anatomist, Thomas Bartholin, published in Copenhagen (København) De bibliothecae incendio, a work of self-consolation. In this work Bartholin recounted examples in history of other library losses through fire, and catalogued and summarized the vast amount of his intellectual work that was "lost to Vulcan." He also consoled himself with a bibliographical list of his works that had already been published in print, and thus had their content protected from catastrophic loss from fire:

"Books are not so readily exposed to destruction if they have multiplied themselves by the aid of type so that they may be read in more than a thousand copies dispersed throughout the earth, unless this universe which we inhabit be subjected to common ruin or flames spread themselves to all corners of the earth. It is by the benefit of divine art that I am as yet able to collect or seek again from friends or from booksellers my other works which were previously published. If judgment in this matter had been left in the hands of Vulcan, I should be bereft even of this small portion of my books. Unless it is burdensome to the reader, I shall subjoin a catalogue of my personal library constructed from works hitherto published in my name or dedicated to me, which Vulcan consumed with the rest, but with less harm to me since they are available elsewhere." (p. 32).

Bartholin then listed 129 printed works either written and published by him or dedicated to him.  At the end of De bibliothecae incendio Bartholin expressed gratitude that he survived the fire even if his "brain-children" were sacrified, and thanks the king, Christian V, for his support after this tragedy. By this time Bartholin was regarded as the leading physician in Denmark, and because of this tragic accident the king of Denmark freed Bartholin's estate of all taxes and appointed Bartholin his personal physician, with handsome compensation.

♦ Bartholin's work reflects a scholarly perspective very different from our time, and also exhibits what would have to be called credulity, especially with the following reference to Homer written in gold on a dragon's intestine—a story which, according to Bartholin, was repeated by several authorities:

"The library of Constantinople, founded by Theodosius the younger in 473, and a rival to that of Ptolemy [i.e. the Library of Alexandria], in the reign of the Emperor Zeno was consumed by a fire instigated by the leader of the image-breakers, the [later] Emperor Leo the Isaurian. Earlier, in the time of Basilicus Tyrannus, the same library had perished in flames aroused by the plebs in their hatred of Basilicus [Basiliscus], and among the books was the intestine of a dragon twenty feet long on which the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer had been written in letters of gold. But Claudius Clemens in his Bibliothecae Instructio considers that it had been snatched from the conflagration, because when Leo the Isaurian, struck by a mad fury against the sacred images, burned whatsoever volumes had been restored of the thirty-three thousand of the library, Constantinus, Cedrenus, Zonaras and Glycas testify that the intestine was still there, unless perchance, in a kind of veneration a new one had been fashioned in imitation of the former intestine which had perished in the first fire. According to the Annals of Constantinus Manassus [Manasses], translated by Lewenclavius, in which the fire is well described, I am disposed to consider the one instigated by Leo III, the Isaurian, as the first." (p.7.)

Bartholin, On the Burning of His Library and On Medical Travel, translated by C. D. O'Malley (1961) 7, 32. (Bracketed insertions and hyperlinks are my additions.)

The first auction sale of a library in England was the library of clergyman Lazarus Seaman. Bookseller William Cooper published a catalogue in Latin of the sale, which took place at Seaman's house:

Catalogus variorum & insignium librorum instructissimæ bibliothecæ clarissimi doctissimiq[ue] viri Lazari Seaman, S.T.D. Quorum auctio habebitur Londini in ædibus defuncti in area & viculo Warwicensi, Octobris ultimo. Cura Gulielmi Cooper bibliopolæ.

In his Foreward to Munby & Coral, British Book Sale Catalogues 1676-1800: A Union List (1977) Anthony Hobson reproduced the Address to the Reader published in the Seaman catalogue as "the ancestor of all subsequent 'Conditions of Sale":

"To the Reader.

"Reader,

"It has not been usual here in England to make Sales of BOOKS by way of Auction, or who will give most for them: But it having been practised in other Countreys to the Advantage both of Buyers and Sellers; It was therefore conceived (for the Encouragement of Learning) to publish the Sale of these Books in this manner of way; and it is hoped that this will not be unacceptable to Schollers; and therefore we thought it convenient to give an Advertisement concerning the manner of proceeding therein.

"First, That having this Catalogue of the Books, and their Editions under their several Heads and Numbers, it will be more easie for any Personal of Quality, Gentlemen, or others, to Depute any one to Buy such Books for them as they shall desire, if their occasions will not permit them to be present at the Auction themselves.

"Secondly, That those which bid most are the Buyers; and if any manifest Differences should arise, that then the same Book or Books shalle forthwith exposed again to Sale, and highest bidder to have the same.

"Thirdly, That all the Books according to the Catalogue are (for so much as know) perfect, and sold as such; But if any of them appear to be otherwise before they be taken away, the Buyer shall have his choice of taking or leaving the same.

"Fourthly, That the Mony for the Books bought, be paid at the Delivery of them, within one Month's time after the Auction is ended.

"Fifthly, That the Auction will begin the 31st of October at the Deceased Dr's House in Warwick Court in Warwick lane punctually at Nine of the Clock in the Morning, and Two in the Afternoon, and this to continue daily until all the Books be Sold. Wherefore it is desired, that the Gentlemen, or those Deputed by them, may be there precisely at the Hours appointed, lest they should miss the opportunity of Buying those Books, which either themselves or their Friends desire" (Hobson, op cit. x-xi).;

ESTC System No. 006092171; ESTC Citation No. R25610. 

Having been expanded under Louis XIV, the Bibliothèque national de France first opened to the public.

The first book catalogue published in North America was the auction catalogue of the library of the non-conformist minister and natural philosopher Rev. Samuel Lee (1625?-91) issued in Boston by bookseller Duncan Cambell (d. 1702). It is known from a single surviving copy preserved in the Boston Public Library:

The library of the late Reverend and learned Mr. Samuel Lee. Containing a choice variety of books upon all subjects; particularly, commentaries on the Bible; bodies of divinity. The works as well of the ancient, as of the modern divines; treatises on the mathematicks, in all parts; history, antiquities; natural philosophy [,] physick, and chymistry; with grammar and school-books. With many more choice books not mentioned in this catalogue. Exposed at the most easy rates, to sale, by Duncan Cambell, bookseller at the dock-head over against the conduit.

"Bookseller's catalogue: 1200 short author entries, in Latin and English, arranged (not entirely consistently) by subject, within subject by language (either Latin or English), and within language by format. The subject headings are divinity (by far the largest); physical books (medicine and science); philosophy, cosmography & geography; mathematical, astrological and astronomical books; history, school authors; juris prudentia, miscellanie, and three miscellaneous lots of consecutively numbered entries"(Winans, A Descriptive Checklist of Book Catalogues Separately Printed in America 1693-1800 [1981] no. 1).

ESTC System No. 006467597; ESTC Citation No. W19259.

In 1697, the year of the death of English astronomer and scholar Edward Bernard, Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti cum indice alphabeticum was issued from Oxford at the Sheldonian Theatre in two folio volumes. Listing around 30,000 manuscripts, this was the first printed attempt at a union catalogue of manuscripts for a country—England, including Ireland, the conquest of which had been completed by the British in 1691.  Centuries earlier in the Middle Ages union catalogues of manuscripts had been compiled in England. About 1320 Oxford Franciscans had compiled, on the basis of on-site surveys, the Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum ueterum — a manuscript union catalogue of some 1400 manuscript books in England, Scotland and Wales, and around 1350 the Benedictine monk Henry of Kirkestede, prior of the royal abbey of St. Edmund at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk—traditionally known as Boston Burienis, compiled a union catalogue of manuscripts in English libraries entitled Catalogus de libris autenticis et aposcrifis. 

Bernard had worked on the catalogue for years when in 1692

"a movement started in Oxford to follow up the catalogue of printed books in Bodley with a catalogue of the manuscripts there and in college libraries. Dr. Edwards, Principal of Jesus, approached the curators of the Clarendon Press, who accepted the proposal. The scheme was enlarged to include the collections in Cambridge and in cathedral libraries and finally in private libraries. Cambridge kept aloof; only four colleges sent their catalogues, and the University Library and the remaining colleges were represented only by a reprint of the lists made by Thomas James in 1600. Bernard was in ill health and died on 12 January, 1697, while the book was still in the press" (Simpson, Proof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [1970] 189, see also 190-94).

Though the printed catalogue identified Edward Bernard as the only author, it was actually a cooperative venture compiled by several scholars. Arthur Charlette, Master of University College, Oxford, seems to have been in charge of gathering information for the catalogue. However, the most significant contributor other than Bernard was probably the Harleian librarian, palaeographer and scholar of Old English Humpfrey Wanley. Wanley researched holdings of collectors in England whose libraries needed to be included, and was the author of four catalogues of holdings within the union catalogue: (1) the Free School at Coventry, (2) Basil Fielding, 4th Earl of Denbigh (3) St. Mary's Church, Warwick, and (4) John Ayres. Wanley also compiled the index to the entire work, wrote the Preface and corrected some of the proofs. References to Wanley's work on the catalogue appear in his letters. See Letters of Humfrey Wanley, Palaeographer, Anglo-Saxonist, Librarian, 1672-1726, Edited by P. L. Heyworth (1989). 

The catalogue is notable for containing the holdings of numerous significant private collectors as well as institutional libraries. Among the better-remembered collectors whose manuscripts are recorded are Samuel Pepys, John Eveyn, William Laud, Thomas Bodley, John Leland, Roger Dodsworth, Richard James, Robert Huntington, and Antony Wood. The crucial holdings of Sir Robert Cotton were not included in Bernard's catalogue because just one year earlier Thomas Smith's Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum bibliothecae Cottonianae had been issued in identical format by the same printer. My copy of Bernard's catalogue was bound at the time with Smith's catalogue of the Cottonian library at the back of its second volume. It would appear that the two works were intended to supplement one another. 

The St. Phillips Episcopal Church Parsonage Provincial Library in Charleston, South Carolina, was founded. It was the first public lending library in the American Colonies.

The sale by auction of the Bigot family library was conducted by booksellers Jean Boudot, Charles Osmont and Gabriel Martin over the remarkably long duration of five months. Prior to this auction several auction catalogues for private libraries were printed in Paris but the libraries were sold privately before auctions could occur. The Bigot sale was in five parts comprising 450 manuscripts and over 15,000 printed books.

Bookseller, publisher and writer Prosper Marchand organized and catalogued the sale for Martin and Osmont. One of the ways in which the sale was notable was in its introduction of the classification scheme which divided information into five great divisions that Marchand borrowed from the seventeenth century astonomer, scientific intermediator, and librarian, Ismaël Boulliau (Bullialdus).  Gabriel Martin promoted this scheme, which originated in the seventeenth century, and may have first been applied in the catalogue of the library of Jacques Auguste de Thou, the Catalogus Bibliothecae Thuanae (1679). The scheme categorized information into the following subject areas: theology, jurisprudence, sciences and arts (initially called philosophy in this catalogue), belles-lettres (humane letters), and history. Book auctions in France would follow this scheme throughout the 18th century, and in the early 19th century Jacques Charles Brunet elaborated on this basic scheme in his Manuel du Libraire et de l'amateur de livres (1810). See Berkvens-Stevelink, Prosper Marchand: la vie et oeuvre (1987) 11-22.

The published auction catalogue was entitled Bibliotheca Bigotiana; seu, Catalogus librorum, quos (dum viverent) summâ curâ & industriâ, ingentique sumptu congressêre vir clarissimi DD. uterque Joannes, Nicolaus, & Lud. Emericus Bigotii, domini de Sommesnil & de Cleuville. . . . 

The Library was begun by Jean Bigot in the early 17th century, and continued by his son, Louis-Emery. It eventually passed to Robert Bigot, sieur de Monville, and was sold at his death in 1706. The library included that of Jean-Jacques de Mesmes, for whom Gabriel Naudé had written Avis pour dresser une bibliothèque in 1627. 

At the auction the abbé de Louvois purchased many books for the Bibliothèque du Roi. "This was Gabriel Martin's first catalogue, and according to Bléchet, Jean-Pierre Nicéron was an editor" (North, Printed Catalogues of French Book Auctions and Sales by Private Treaty 1643-1830 in the Library of the Grolier Club [2004] no. 12).

The Bigot manuscripts were purchased for the Bibliothèque du roi. Over 150 years later they were catalogued by Léopold Delisle as Bibliotheca Bigotiana Manuscripta. Catalogue des manuscrits rassemblés aux XVIIe siecle par les Bigot, mis en vente au mois de juillet 1706, aujourdhui conservé aux Bibliothèque nationale (1877).

Albert, Recherches sur les principes fondamentaux de la classification bibliographique. . . . (1847) 17-19.

In 1709 British parliament enacted the Statute of Anne; short title: Copyright Act 1709 8 Anne c.21; long title: An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned. 

Named after Anne, Queen of Great Britain, this was the first copyright statute in the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the first full-fledged copyright statute in the world. It was enacted in the regnal year 1709 to 1710 and entered into force on April 10, 1710.  

The Statute of Anne granted publishers of books legal protection for 14 years with the commencement of the statute. It also granted 21 years of protection for any book already in print. At the expiration of the first 14 year copyright term the copyright re-vested in its author, if he or she were still alive, for a further term of 14 years.

"The statute determined that the 'copy' was the 'sole liberty of printing and reprinting' a book and this liberty could be infringed by any person who printed, reprinted or imported the book without consent. Those infringing copyright had to pay a fine of one penny for every sheet of the book, one moiety of which went to the author, the other to the Crown. In today’s terms this was a considerable fine. In addition the book in question was to be destroyed. Leaving in place the existing system of registration, the statute specified that action against infringement could only be brought if the title had been entered in the register at the Stationers' Company before publication. The formal requirements of registration enabled users to locate the owners of copyrighted works. The requirement for copies of published books to be deposited in university libraries ensured that there was public access to copyrighted works.

"Authors' rights

"The statute was the first to recognise the legal right of authorship, but it did not provide a coherent understanding of authorship or authors' rights. While the statute established the author as legal owner, and so providing the basis for the development of authors' copyright, it also provided a 21 year copyright term to books already in print. At the end of the 21 years granted by the statute the concept of literary property was still a booksellers' rather than an author' concern, as most authors continued to sell their works outright to booksellers. Given that the statute primarily intended to encourage public learning and to regulate the book trade, any benefits for authors in the statute were incidental. Throughout the 18th century, at the encouragement of the booksellers, rather than the authors, an understanding emerged that copyright originated in author's rights to the product of his labour. Thus it was argued that the primary purpose of copyright was to protect authors' rights, not the policy goal of encouraging public learning" (Wikipedia article on Statute of Anne, accessed 08-06-2011).

Benajmin Franklin and a group of his Philadelphia friends seeking social, economic, intellectual and political advancement, formed a discussion group called "the Junto," also known as "The Leather Apron Club."

The Library Company of Philadelphia was an offshoot of the Junto. "On July 1, 1731, Franklin and a number of his fellow members among the Junto drew up "Articles of Agreement" to found a library, for they had discovered that their far-ranging conversations on intellectual and political themes foundered at times on a point of fact that might be found in a decent library. In colonial Pennsylvania at the time there were not many books; Books from London booksellers were expensive to purchase and slow to arrive. Franklin and his friends were mostly of moderate means, and none alone could have afforded a representative library such as a gentleman of leisure might expect to assemble. By pooling their resources in pragmatic Franklinian fashion, as the Library Company's historian wrote, 'the contribution of each created the book capital of all.' The first librarian they hired was Louis Timothee, being America's first.

"Thus fifty subscribers invested 40 shillings each and promised to pay ten shillings a year thereafter to buy books and maintain a shareholder's library. Therefore, 'the Mother of all American subscription libraries; was established, and a list of desired books compiled in part by James Logan, 'the best Judge of Books in these parts,' was sent to London and by autumn the first books were on the shelves" (Wikipedia article on Library Company of Philadelphia, accessed 11-27-2011).

In 1739 French scholar and Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon published Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum Manuscriptorum nova in Paris. A catalogue of all the manuscript collections in France and Italy with which Montfaucon was familiar, plus small sections on manuscripts in libraries in Germany, Netherlands and England, this 1669-page work in 2 folio volumes was the first attempt at a continent-wide catalogue of manuscripts. Its emphasis was on medieval and Renaissance texts.

Montfaucon began with a list of all the libraries, institutional and private, for which he published holdings. These included the well-known collections and those of medieval monasteries such as Bobbio, Corbie and Fulda, but also including lesser-known monastic libraries. Then he published a 250-page index of authors and codices.  The work then listed the manuscript contents of libraries by country beginning with Italy and the Vatican Library. The work ended with another 160-page index of authors and "rerum" (things). The comprehensive indices make it possible to locate manuscript texts by author and subject. As such it remains the most useful tool for checking the distribution of manuscript texts in European libraries, and their survival in institutions up to the first third of the eighteenth century.

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 175, note.

The will of English physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed his collection of 70,000 objects, including a library, and an herbarium to Britain as the basis for the British Museum.

"When Sloane retired in 1741, his library and cabinet of curiosities . . . had grown to be of unique value. He had acquired the extensive natural history collections of William Courten, Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualterio, James Petiver, Nehemiah Grew, Leonard Plukenet, the Duchess of Beaufort, the rev. Adam Buddle, Paul Hermann, Franz Kiggelaer and Herman Boerhaave. On his death on 11 January 1753 he bequeathed his books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, flora, fauna, medals, coins, seals, cameos and other curiosities to the nation, on condition that parliament should pay to his executors £20,000, which was a good deal less than the value of the collection. The bequest was accepted on those terms by an act passed the same year, and the collection, together with George II's royal library, etc., was opened to the public at Bloomsbury as the British Museum in 1759. A significant proportion of this collection was later to become the foundation for the Natural History Museum" (Wikipedia article on Sir Hans Sloane).

King George II donated the 'Old Royal Library' of the sovereigns of England to the British Museum. With that gift the British Museum obtained the privilege of acquiring books by copyright receipt.

Having been founded in 1753 by the bequest of English physician Sir Hans Sloane, the British Museum opened to the public.

Sloane's library of about 40,000 volumes, especially significant for scientific and medical material, was among the largest formed in the eighteenth century. The British Museum retained all the Sloane manuscripts, but during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they dispersed certain printed books from the collection as "duplicates." 

♦ The Sloane Printed Books Catalogue on the British Library website is a project to publish bibliographical descriptions of each volume in Sloane's original library from institutional holdings around the world.

On the night of July 4, 1776, by order of the Second Continental Congress, immediately after its approval of the text of the Declaration, Philadelphia printer John Dunlap printed approximately 200 copies of The Declaration of Independence as a broadside.  The following day copies were delivered to the President of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, who sent them to the state governors on July 5 and 6.

The text of the Declaration was reprinted in the The Pennsylvania Evening Post newspaper for Saturday, July 6 (vol. II, number 228) published in Philadelphia by Benjamin Towne. This was the first newspaper printing and the second printing chronologically. Within a month of Dunlap's broadside printing a dozen regional broadside editions were printed, all of the greatest rarity, as far north as Salem, Massachusetts, and Exeter, New Hampshire, and as far south as Charleston, South Carolina. However, it is likely that even more Americans read the words of the Declaration in one of the many newspaper printings, of which Clarence Brigham identified thirty in the month of July 1776, produced in eighteen cities and towns ranging from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Williamsburg, Virginia.

Copies of the Declaration of Indpendence were read publically by Colonel John Nixon from from a platform behind the Pennsylvania Statehouse (Independence Hall) on July 8, and on July 9 by George Washington on the commons of New York City to the Continental Army and local citizens, who celebrated by tearing down the statue of George III in Bowling Green. On July 28 Viscount Admiral Richard Howe of the British Navy intercepted a copy and dispatched it to London.

Regarding the first printing of the broadside:

"There is evidence that it was done quickly, and in excitement — watermarks are reversed, some copies look as if they were folded before the ink could dry and bits of punctuation move around from one copy to another. 'We were all in haste,' John Adams later wrote."

Surprisingly these printed broadsides, of which 25 copies survived in 2008, are the earliest records of the final draft of the document, as the original manuscript draft from which the broadside was printed no longer survives. 

The manuscript dated July 4, 1776 in the National Archives was back-dated. A fair copy of the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote out in the week after July 4, 1776, is preserved in the New York Public Library. This is one of two surviving fair copies in Jefferson's hand.

"A copy was also preserved by the Secretary of the Congress, Charles Thompson, in his minutes book; and it was to this text that a scribe, commissioned by the Congress, turned when preparing the ceremonial manuscript copy of the Declaration on parchment, preserved at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., which was signed by members of the Continental Congress on August 2, 1776. The printed Declaration of Independence thus predates the famous copy, signed by John Hancock et al., by nearly a month. The printed copy bears only the names, in type, of Hancock and Thompson on behalf of the Congress, and of the printer John Dunlap; it was the promulgation of an act of Congress and needed nothing more. The text of the ceremonial copy differs from that of the printed original only in its title: it became a “Unanimous Declaration” only later in July 1776, when New York State’s members of Congress changed their vote from abstention to the affirmative" (http://chapin.williams.edu/exhibits/founding.html#declaration, accessed 04-20-2012).

Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers (1947), 2:931–33. Walsh, "Contemporary Broadside Printings of the Declaration of Independence," Harvard Library Bulletin, 3 (1949).

French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée proposed a reconstruction of the Bibliothèque du Roi that would contain in one gigantic reading room the entire "memory of the world."

The British Museum published the first catalogue of its library: Librorum impressorum qui in Museo Britannico adservantur catalogus.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 109.

The French Revolutionary government issued the French Cataloging Code of 1791, for the cataloging of libraries seized from religious houses and brought to literary depots at several locations in Paris. The staff at each depot was to record on cards the basic particulars about each item held. These cards were then bound up in bundles and sent to the Paris Bureau de Bibliographie. Because of wartime shortages, the blank backs of confiscated playing cards were used to record the information. 

The title page was transcribed on the card and the author’s surname underlined for the filing word. If there was no author, a keyword in the title was underlined. A collation was added that was to include number of volumes, size, a statement of illustration, the material of which the book was made, the kind of type, any missing pages, and a description of the binding if it was outstanding in any way. The collation was partly for the purpose of identifying valuable books that the government might offer for sale in order to increase government revenue.

After the cards were filled in and put in order by underlined filing word, they were strung together by running a needle and thread through the lower left hand corners to keep them in order.

♦ This may be the earliest documentation of the use of cards for the production of library catalogs.

Joseph Smally, "The French Cataloging Code of 1791: A Translation," The Library Quarterly, 61 Number 1 (January 1991) 1–14.

American clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap founded the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first historical society in the United States.

"As he [Belknap] envisioned it, the MHS would become a repository and a publisher collecting, preserving, and disseminating resources for the study of American history. Through their pledges of family papers, books, and artifacts the founding members made the Society the nation's most important historical repository by the end of their initial meeting. With the appearance of their first title at the start of 1792, they also made the MHS the nation's first institution of any description to publish in its field."

In a letter to Ebenezer Hazard written during Jefferson's tenure as Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson wrote concerning the preservation of information:

". . . let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident."

Jefferson's idea of preserving texts by distributing copies had been anticipated by exponents of the new invention of printing by movable type in the second half of the fifteenth century who believed, and rightly so, that printing an edition of a text that might survive in only one or a handful of manuscript copies was a way of safeguarding the existence of the text.

By an act of the revolutionary French National Convention, the Bibliothèque nationale de France became the first free public national library in the world.

French Catholic priest and revolutionary leader Henri Grégoire (Abbé Grégoire) published Instruction Publique. Rapport sur la bibliographie, delivered at the Convention nationale, seance du 22 Germinal, l'a 2 de la République. I have two different typeset versions of this pamphlet in my library, both of which consist of 16pp.  That with the colophon: DE L'IMPRIMERIE NATIONALE on the last leaf would appear to be first.

Grégoire believed that a French national bibliography would furnish material for :

1) a new history of France

2) a dictionary of pseudonymous and anonymous literature

3) a new geneological table of human knowledge

4) paleography of the French language, "which will be from now on the language of liberty."

By exchanging duplicates of rare and very expensive volumes, including specifically incunabula printed on vellum, the Bibliothèque nationale could be completed. (p. 11)

Abbé Grégoire hoped that the French government would sponsor this project, which it did not.  Had it done so, this would have been the first government-sponsored national bibliography.

Grégoire also condemned the recent destruction of libraries during the Revolutionary violence, and celebrated the arrival in Paris of a copy of Titus Livius, Historiae Romanae decades, edited by Joannes Andrea Bussi, bishop of Aleria. Venice: Vindelinus de Spira, 1470.  ISTC No.: il00238000. To Grégoire the copy was notable not only because of its rarity but because during a seige a bullet broke through its covers and margins without damaging the text (Grégoire p. 11).

An English translation of Grégoire's work was published in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin Bache in 1794: National Convention. Report on the means of compleating and distributing the National Library Made in the name of the Committee of Public Instruction, the 22d germinal, second year of the Republic. (April 11, 1794.) 

On April 24, 1800 President John Adams signed legislation providing $5000 to purchase books as necessary for the “use of Congress.”

This was the origin of the Library of Congress. The Library was originally housed in the United States Capitol building.

Congressman John Randolph of Virginia published Report of the Joint Committee Appointed to Take into Consideration the Arrangement of Books and Maps Belonging to Congress.

This six-page pamphlet was instrumental in the organization of the Library of Congress.

The first catalogue of the Library of Congress was a ten-page pamphlet:

Catalogue of Books, Maps, and Charts, Belonging to the Library of the Two Houses of Congress.

This listed the original collection according to size: folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos, with estimated values for each, followed by nine maps and charts. 

In October 1803 the first supplement appeared:

Supplemental Catalogue of Books, Maps, Charts, Belonging to the Library of the Two Houses of Congress.

This 7-page pamphlet listed 180 volumes added since April 1802.

Sabin 15560 & 15561.

The Roxburghe Club, the oldest society of bibliophiles in the world, was founded. Membership was limited to 40.

"The Club came into existence on 16 June 1812 when a group of book-collectors and bibliophiles, inspired by the Revd Thomas Dibdin, panegyrist of Lord Spencer, the greatest collector of the age, dined together on the eve of the sale of John, Duke of Roxburghe’s library, which took place on the following day. This was the greatest private library of the previous age, and the sale was confidently expected to break all records, and it did. The first edition of Boccaccio (then believed to be unique) printed in 1471 made £2,260, a record that stood for more than sixty years, and the Duke’s Caxtons made equally high prices. The diners decided that this occasion should not be forgotten and so they dined again together the next year on June 17, the anniversary of the sale, and again the year after. So the Roxburghe Club was born and its members still dine together each year on, or about, that memorable day" (The Roxburghe Club website).

The archives of The Roxburghe Club are maintained at Arundel Castle, West Sussex.

During the War of 1812 British Troops set fire to the U.S. Capitol building, burning, among other things, the Library of Congress, which then contained 3,000 volumes.

Within a month after the burning of the Library of Congress in the United States Capitol building President Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement.

Jefferson spent 50 years accumulating 6,487 books, "putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science." His library was considered one of the finest in the United States.

Jefferson, who was heavily indebted, sought to use the proceeds of the sale of his library to satisfy his creditors. He anticipated controversy over the nature of his collection, which included books in foreign languages and volumes of philosophy, science, literature, and other topics not normally viewed as part of a legislative library. He wrote: "I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer."

Congress appropriated $23,950 for Thomas Jefferson's library of 6,487 books which he had collected over the previous fifty years, laying a new intellectual foundation, universal in scope, for the Library of Congress.

The purchase price was estimated to be half of the value that the books would have achieved at auction.

George Watterson, Librarian of Congress, published Catalogue of the Library of the United States. To Which is Annexed a Copious Index, Alphabeticaly Arranged. This work of 170 pages and 32 pages of index, was printed for Congress by Jonathan Elliot and issued from Washington. It represented the catalogue of the library of Thomas Jefferson, the foundation of the Library of Congress.

"In it each entry was numbered, not serially, but with the number corresponding with Jefferson's shelf-mark. This number was also inserted in the bookplate, purchased from William Elliot in October 1815, and pasted into each volume. The manuscript catalogue written by Jefferson and submitted to Congress for the purposes of the sale (through Samuel Harrison Smith) in 1814, seems to have been the 'fair copy of the Catalogue of my library' which he had made in 1812. This was later taken away by George Watterson and has now disappeared . . . [Another] catalogue was originally written by Jefferson in 1783, and is so dated by him on the fly-leaf; it was added to and supplemented continuously until the time of the negotiations for the sale in 1814' - Sowerby.

"The present catalogue differs dramatically in arrangement from Jefferson's original system of classification. Jefferson had organized his library according to a system derived from Book 2 of Francis Bacon's ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. Beginning with Bacon's three categories of knowledge (memory, reason, and imagination), Jefferson devised forty-four classes or 'chapters.' Within chapters, the books were arranged sometimes analytically, sometimes chronologically, or both, and were subjected to further classification by size. While this method served Jefferson well and offered illuminating intellectual bridges between diverse fields, Watterson recognized the difficulty the average patron might have in accessing the books for which he might be searching. To remedy this problem, in the present catalogue Watterson arranged the catalogue alphabetically within each chapter by first word of the title without being prejudiced towards definite and indefinite articles. Both Watterson and Jefferson realized the imperfections of this new system, but once in place it proved too large a task to rectify it" (William Reese Company, online description, accessed from ILAB website 07-21-2009).

In 1820 Congress published Supplement to the Catalogue of the Library of Congress. This 28-page pamphlet listed approximately 700 titles acquired since the acquisition of Thomas Jefferson's library, with a focus on travels and voyages, the sciences, and European history. Sabin 15566.

On February 22, 1821 the École nationale des chartes, an elite French university-level institution providing education and training for archivists and librarians, was founded by royal ordinance at the Bibliothèque royale, predecessor of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The school closed in 1823, and reopened following a new ordinance of November 11, 1829. In 1862 the school moved to a site close to the Archives nationales, and later still to the Sorbonne, to facilities intended for the suppressed theology department.

Moore, Restoring Order. The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (2008).

In 1830 German jurist, legal historian and paleographer Gustav Friedrich Haenel (Hänel) published in Leipzig Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum, qui in bibliothecis Galliae, Helvetiae, Belgii, Britanniae M., Hispaniae, Lusitaniae asservantur. This work, with approximately 620 pages published in a single quarto volume, was the first attempt since that of Montfaucon in 1739 to publish a union catalogue of manuscripts in European libraries. In this work Haenel left out the vast holdings of the entire Italian peninsula and Germany. Besides listings of manuscripts, Haenel, who visited many of the libraries covered, sometimes provided useful information regarding the history of each library, the number of printed works held, and the number of manuscripts in each library. 

Twenty-three years later, in 1853, the Abbé Jacques Paul Migne published in Paris a revised and expanded edition of Haenel's work entitled Dictionnaire des manuscrits, ou receuil de catalogues de manuscrits existants dans les principales bibliothèques d'Europe. Migne's edition, prepared by an anonymous editor, appeared in two volumes, the pages of which were set in two columns of relatively densely set type. The set appeared as part of Migne's inexpensive and widely distributed series of theological works intended to form a universal library for the Catholic priesthood. To update information in French libraries the editor incorporated information provided in the first volume of the French union catalogue of manuscripts published in 1849.  The editor also added extensive coverage of manuscripts in libraries in Germany and on the Italian peninsula, making this the first truly continent-wide union catalogue of manuscripts since Montfaucon, which continued to be cited when no other convenient source of information was available. 

The Eighth Surgeon General of the United States Army Joseph Lovell purchased books and journals, establishing the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, also called the Library of the Surgeon General of the Army on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

In 1840 the library issued its first catalogue as a manuscript notebook. This library eventually evolved into the National Library of Medicine, now located in Bethesda, Maryland.

From his private press at his estate at Middle Hill, Broadway, Worcestershire, England, Sir Thomas Phillipps issued Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum in bibliotheca d. Thomae Phillips, Bt.

According to A.N.L. Munby, this catalogue of Phillipps's manuscript collection, published in fascicules, or parts, over more than thirty years, was issued in only 50 copies, of which only three surviving copies may be considered complete. The fascicules were printed by a variety of printers, only some of whom worked at Phillipps's estate, and Phillipps bound up copies from both corrected and uncorrected sheets, resulting in copies that are exceptional in their bibliographical complexity. The catalogue includes 23,837 entries, which, for various reasons outlined by Munby, describe a considerably larger collection that may have comprised about 60,000 manuscripts. In 1968 Munby issued, in an edition of 500 copies, a facsimile of a complete copy of the Phillips catalogue which belonged at the time to rare book dealer Lew D. Feldman: The Phillipps Manuscripts. Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum . . . with an introduction by A.N.L. Munby. (London: Holland Press).

"Philipps began his collecting while still at Rugby School and continued at Oxford. Such was his devotion that he acquired some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts, arguably the largest collection a single individual has created. . . . A.N.L. Munby notes that '[h]e spent perhaps between two hundred thousand and a quarter of a million pounds[,] altogether four or five thousand pounds a year, while accessions came in at the rate of forty or fifty a week.' His success as a collector owed something to the dispersal of the monastic libraries following the French Revolution and the relative cheapness of a large amount of vellum material, in particular English legal documents, many of which owe their survival to Phillipps. He was an assiduous cataloguer who established the Middle Hill Press (named after his country seat at Broadway, Worcestershire) in 1822 not only to record his book holdings but also to publish his findings in English topography and geneology."

"During his lifetime Phillipps attempted to turn over his collection to the British nation and corresponded with the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Disraeli in order that it should be acquired for the British Library. Negotiations proved unsuccessful and ultimately the dispersal of his collection took over 100 years. Phillipps's will stipulated that his books should remain intact at Thirlestaine House, that no bookseller or stranger should rearrange them and that no Roman Catholic should be permitted to view them. In 1885 the Court of Chancery declared this too restrictive and thus made possible the sale of the library which Phillipps’s grandson Thomas FitzRoy Fenwick supervised for the next fifty years. Significant portions of the European material were sold to the national collections on the continent including the Royal Library, Berlin, the Royal Library of Belgium and the Provincial Archives in Utrecht as well as the sale of outstanding individual items to the J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry E. Huntington libraries. By 1946 what was known as the 'residue' was sold to London booksellers Phillip and Lionel Robinson for £100,000, though this part of the collection was uncatalogued and unexamined. The Robinsons endeavored to sell these books through their own published catalogues and a number of Sothebys sales. The final portion of the collection was sold to New York bookseller H.P. Kraus in 1977 who issued a sale catalogue the same year: the last to bear the title Bibliotheca Phillippica. A five-volume history of the collection and its dispersal, Phillipps Studies, by A.N.L. Munby was published between 1951 and 1960" (Wikipedia article on Sir Thomas Phillipps, accessed 11-25-2008).

The British Parliament established the Public Record Office (PRO) to reform the keeping of government archives and court records. 

"Up till this time the records were being held, sometimes in poor conditions, in a variety of places."Some of these were court or departmental archives (established for several centuries) which were well run and had good or adequate catalogues; others were little more than store-rooms. Many of the professional staff of these individual archives simply continued their existing work in the new institution. A good number of documents were transferred from the Tower of London and the chapter house of Westminster Abbey, though the Domesday Book was not moved from Westminster until the 1850s, when proper storage had been prepared.

"The PRO was placed under the control of the Master of the Rolls, a senior judge whose job had originally included responsibility for keeping the records of the Chancery Court, and was originally located in the mediaeval Rolls Chapel (the former Domus Conversorum), a sort of halfway house for Jews who converted to Christianity, on Chancery Lane at the boundary of the City of London with Westminster. The first Master of the Rolls to take on this responsibility was Lord Langdale, while his Deputy Keeper, the historian Sir Francis Palgrave, had full-time responsibility for running the Office.

"There was no right to consult the records freely for scholarly purposes until 1852, despite the 1838 Public Record Office Act's intention of enabling public access. Fees were paid by lawyers who used the archives to consult a limited number of documents. These charges were abolished for serious historical and literary researchers after a petition was signed in 1851 by 83 people including Dickens, Macaulay, and Carlyle.

"A purpose built archive was designed and built between 1851 and 1858 (architect: Sir James Pennethorne) and extended onto the site of the Rolls Chapel, which was demolished as it was structurally unsound, between 1895 and 1902. Public search rooms were opened in 1866, but greater access led the authorities to restrict certain classes of document, and to favour visitors who were experienced in dealing with historical material.

"The growing size of the archives held by the PRO and by government departments led to the Public Records Act 1958, which established standard procedures for the selection of documents of historical importance to be kept by the PRO. Even so, growing interest in the records produced a need for the Office to expand, and a second building was opened at Kew in south-west London in 1977. The Kew building was expanded in the 1990s and all records were transferred from Chancery Lane to Kew or the Family Records Centre in Islington by 1997. The Chancery Lane building is now known as the Maughan Library, the largest library of King's College London" (Wikipedia article on Public Record Office, accessed 07-11-2009).

In 1841 Antonio Panizzi, Keeper of the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum (now the British Library), published 91 Rules for Compilation of the Catalogue. 

These rules represented the first attempt to standardize cataloguing of printed books. They appeared in the Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Museum, Volume 1, pp. v-ix. published in 1841. Remarkably only this single volume, covering the letter A, was published under Panizzi's direction. The full catalogue did not begin to appear until 1881.  Panizzi undoubtedly intended his rules for usage within the British Museum cataloguing department, but he must also have intended them to circulate to librarians at other institutions through copies of the printed catalogue.  Whether they were adopted at other institutions I do not know. 

That no further volumes of the printed catalogue appeared in print until 40 years later was in no small part due to Panizzi's own objections to the huge cost of printing versus what he perceived as relatively small utility, and rapid obsolescence of printed catalogues, requiring frequent supplements. Having only a manuscript catalogue meant, of course, that the catalogue could only be consulted by users of the reading room.  It also meant uneven legibility depending upon the quality of handwriting of whoever entered the data. It also meant that making a duplicate copy of a large printed catalogue would be very costly and might incorporate scribal errors. Having a printed catalogue would, of course be more legible, and having more than one copy available would allow more than one user to search the same portions at a time. Having the printed catalogue available at other research libraries would allow users in other cities and countries to know the holdings of the British Museum.  Clearly this would stimulate scholarship.  But to Panizzi and other librarians accustomed to working with manuscript catalogues these aspects did not seem convincing at the time.  In his Memoirs of Libraries, Vol. II (1859) Edward Edwards devoted a chapter (pp. 850-868) of his section on library economy to the question of whether to print or not to print library catalogues because this was a topic currently in active discussion. Edwards clearly believed that the act of preparing a manuscript catalogue for the press would improve cataloguing, and that printed catalogues were superior to manuscript.  But the wheels of progress seem to have turned slowly in the catalogue department of the British Museum and in other national libraries, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France where the printed author catalogue did not begin to appear until 1897.

Various of Panizzi's rules reflect social attitudes of the day. For example:

"V. Works of Jewish Rabbis, as well as works of Oriental writers in general, to be entered under their first name."

Concerning the rules and the catalogue Panizzi wrote in his preface to the first volume:

"The rules on which this Catalogue is based were sanctioned by the Trustees on the 13th of July, 1839; and, with the exception of such modifications as have been found necessary in order to accelerate the progress of the work, they have been strictly adhered to. Some additional rules, the want of which was not foreseen at the commencement, are printed in italics.

"The application of the rules was left by the Trustees to the discretion of the Editor, subject to the condition that a Catalogue of the printed books in the library up to the close of the year 1838 be completed within the year 1844. With a view to the fulfillment of this undertaking it was deemed indispensable that the Catalogue should should be put to press as soon as any portion of the manuscript could be prepared; consequently the early volumes must present omissions and inaccuracies, which it is hoped, will diminish in number as the work proceeds.

"In giving to the world the first volume of a Catalogue, which promises to be of an unprecedented extent, the Editor thinks that it would be premature to name each gentleman in his department to whose zeal and talents he is indebted for much that will add to its usefulness. He looks forward to a continuation of the same assistance; and he, therefore, reserves till after the conlusion of the work the particular expression of his obligations.

"British Museum, July 15th, 1841

"A. Panizzi"

William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, photographed books in his library during 1843-1844. This was undoubtedly one of the earliest photographs of books. Fox Talbot later published this photograph in The Pencil of Nature. 

"An exceptional student first at Harrow and later at Cambridge, Talbot was a man of great learning and broad interests. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, botany, chemistry, Egyptology, philology, and the classics were all within the scope of his investigative appetite. The Philosophical Magazine, Miscellanies of Science, Botanische Schriften, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Philological Essays, Poetae Minores Graeci, and Lanzi's Storia pittorica dell'Italia are among the volumes represented in this photograph—truly an intellectual self-portrait. The image appeared as plate 8 in The Pencil of Nature. Paradoxically, A Scene in a Library was taken out of doors, where the light was stronger" (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2005.100.172, accessed 10-25-2011).

In 1849 the first volume of Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques des départements publié sous les auspices du Ministre d’instruction publique was published in Paris by the Imprimérie nationale. The 904-page quarto volume, with 2 folding lithographed plates, was the first installment of the first government-sponsored national union catalogue of manuscripts. The series eventually reached its fifty-ninth volume in 1975.

The first volume was undertaken under the leadership of the mathematician, paleographer and book thief, Guglielmo Libri. To this volume Libri made several major contributions. Besides his catalogue of the Seminary at Autun, first published separately in 1846, Libri wrote the catalogues of the city library and the medical school library at Montpellier, and of the library at Albi. Because Libri resigned from the commission before the catalogues received their final editing his work was revised for publication by Félix Ravaisson-Mollien.

The Boston Public Library, the first publicly supported municipal library in the United States, was founded in 1848.

Foundation of the Boston Public Library, the first publicly supported municipal library in the United States, the first large library open to the public in the United States, and the first public library in the U.S. to allow people to borrow books and other materials and take them home to read and use.

The House of Commons published Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries; Together with Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix. This proceedings was largely motivated by the report of Edward Edwards entitled Approximate Statistical View of the Principal Public Libraries of Europe and of the United States of America, which is published as an Appendix  on pp. 255-305.  The validity of much of these statistics has been criticized, but their publication had a beneficial effect on library development.

The report contained extensive testimony by Edward Edwards, François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, Guglielmo (William) Libri, and Samuel Smiles.

As a result of this report politician William Ewart sponsored the 1850 Public Libraries Act, and because of his contributions Edward Edwards was appointed the first librarian of the first major library opened under the Public Libraries Act, the Manchester Free Library. Edwards resigned from this post in 1858. 

The Public Libraries Act 1850 (13 & 14 Vict c.65), an Act of the United Kingdom Parliament, gave local boroughs the power to establish free public libraries for the first time.

"The Act was the first legislative step in the creation of an enduring national institution that provides universal free access to information and literature, and was indicative of the moral, social and educative concerns of the time. The legacy of the Act can be followed through subsequent legislation that built on and expanded the powers granted in 1850 and the 4,540 public libraries that exist in the United Kingdom in 2010 can trace their origins back to this Act" (Wikipedia article on Public Libraries Act 1850).

A fire in the Library of Congress destroyed 35,000 books, about two-thirds of the Library's 55,000 book collection, including two-thirds of Thomas Jefferson's library. This was the largest fire in the history of the Library of Congress

 "Congress responded quickly and generously: in 1852 a total of $168,700 was appropriated to restore the Library's rooms in the Capitol and to replace the lost books. But the books were to be replaced only, with no particular intention of supplementing or expanding the collection. This policy reflected the conservative philosophy of Librarian of Congress John Silva Meehan and Sen. James A. Pearce of Maryland, the chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library, who favored keeping a strict limit on the Library's activities"( http://www.loc.gov/loc/legacy/loc.html, accessed 10-09-2009).

Charles C. Jewett, librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, published On the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries and Their Publication by Means of Separate Stereotyped Titles With Rules and Examples. In this work Jewett described a plan for a national union catalogue of public libraries.

"His [Jewett's] intention was to secure general uniformity of bibliographic records through a system of "stereotyping" each title. This plan would have made it possible for libraries to print annual editions of their catalogs, incorporating the titles acquired 'during the previous year in each new edition, and for the Smithsonian to print a general union catalog which would have included' both its own holdings and those of all the public libraries. The uniformity Jewett sought was to be achieved not just through stereotyping but also through use of a single set of general cataloging rules which would be used by all the libraries. In the same year Jewett published a report titled On the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries which, among other things, set forth the first American cataloging rules for establishing headings for author entries. The report contained thirty-nine rules which were based on those of Panizzi. In fact Jewett acknowledged outright that he used some of Panizzi's rules verbatim. And Jewett's stated goal of serving the needs of users also reflected Panizzi s ideas. Though his project never came to final fruition, years later his goal of compiling a union catalog was met in the United States when the National Union Catalog began publication in 1953 and in Germany as early as 1899 when the Prussian Instructions was compiled under Jewett's influence" (J R. Hufford, The Pragmatic Basis of Catalog Codes: Has the User Been Ignored [2007] 29).

In 1856 bibliographer Andrea Crestadoro, an acquaintance of Anthony Panizzi, exasperated with delays in production of the British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books, published anonymously The Art of Making Catalogues of Libraries, or a Method to Obtain a Most Perfect Complete and Satisfactory Printed Catalogue of the British Museum Library by a Reader Therein.

Crestadoro's booklet served as basis for a catalogue code. "In it he advocated the idea of the 'inventorial' catalog which would have detailed entries arranged in order of accession. The library patron was to be provided access to the entries through an alphabetical index of names and subjects. The Public Library of Manchester, England adopted this approach for its catalog and hired Crestadoro to implement it there in 1864. Like Panizzi, Crestadoro intended to have his catalog serve the needs of catalog users, but the rules of his code were not based on an empirical investigation of those needs" (J. R. Hufford, The Pragmatic Basis of Catalog Codes: Has the User Been Ignored [2007] 29).

At the end of his pamphlet Crestadoro advocated production of a universal catalogue of all publications.

Crestadoro implemented his ideas for Keyword in Context Indexing (KWIC) in the Catalogue of the Manchester Free Library: Reference Department  (1864). 

On his third visit to the library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai in Egypt, biblical scholar Constantin von Tischendorf discovered the Codex Sinaiticus .

"The first two trips [in 1844 and 1854] had yielded parts of the Old Testament, some from a rubbish bin. The emperor Alexander II of Russia sent him to search for manuscripts, which he was convinced were still to be found in the Sinai monastery."

"The story of how von Tischendorf found the manuscript, which contained most of the Old Testament and all of the New Testament, has all the elements of a romance. Von Tischendorf reached the monastery on January 14; but his inquiries appeared to be fruitless. On February 4, he had resolved to return home without having achieved his goal.

"On that day, when walking with the provisor of the convent, he spoke with much regret of his ill-success. Returning from their promenade, Tischendorf accompanied the monk to his room, and there had displayed to him what his companion called a copy of the Septuagint, which he, the ghostly brother, owned. The manuscript was wrapped up in a piece of cloth, and on its being unrolled, to the surprise and delight of the critic the very document presented itself which he had given up all hope of seeing. His object had been to complete the fragmentary Septuagint of 1844, which he had declared to be the most ancient of all Greek codices on vellum that are extant; but he found not only that, but a copy of the Greek New Testament attached, of the same age, and perfectly complete, not wanting a single page or paragraph."

"After some negotiations, he [Tischendorf] obtained possession of this precious fragment. James Bentley gives an account of how this came about, prefacing it with the comment, 'Tischendorf therefore now embarked on the remarkable piece of duplicity which was to occupy him for the next decade, which involved the careful suppression of facts and the systematic denigration of the monks of Mount Sinai.' He conveyed it to Tsar Alexander II, who appreciated its importance and had it published as nearly as possible in facsimile, so as to exhibit correctly the ancient handwriting. The Tsar sent the monastery 9000 rubles by way of compensation.

"Regarding Tischendorf's role in the transfer to Saint Petersburg, there are several views. Although when parts of Genesis and Book of Numbers were later found in the bindings of other books, they were amicably sent to Tischendorf, the codex is currently regarded by the monastery as having been stolen. This view is hotly contested by several scholars in Europe. Kirsopp Lake wrote: 

"Those who have had much to do with Oriental monks will understand how improbable it is that the terms of the arrangement, whatever it was, were ever known to any except of the leaders.

In a more neutral spirit, New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger wrote:

Certain aspects of the negotiations leading to the transfer of the codex to the Tsar's possession are open to an interpretation that reflects adversely on Tischendorf's candour and good faith with the monks at St. Catherine's. For a recent account intended to exculpate him of blame, see Erhard Lauch's article 'Nichts gegen Tischendorf' in Bekenntnis zur Kirche: Festgabe für Ernst Sommerlath zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin, c. 1961); for an account that includes a hitherto unknown receipt given by Tischendorf to the authorities at the monastery promising to return the manuscript from Saint Petersburg 'to the Holy Confraternity of Sinai at its earliest request'.

"In 13 September 1862 Constantine Simonides, a forger of manuscripts who had been exposed by Tischendorf, by way of revenge made the claim in print in The Guardian that he had written the codex himself as a young man in 1839.

"Henry Bradshaw, a [librarian and] scholar, contributed to exposing the frauds of Constantine Simonides, and exposed the absurdity of his claims in a letter to The Guardian (January 26, 1863). Bradshaw showed that the Codex Sinaiticus brought by Tischendorf from the Greek monastery of Mount Sinai was not a modern forgery or written by Simonides. Simonides' "claim was flawed from the beginning" (Wikipedia article on Codex Sinaiticus, accessed 08-08-2009).

Book Trade notes:

♦ "In 1931 Ernest Maggs had travelled to the Soviet Union with a colleague, Maurice Ettinghausen, who was both a bookseller and a scholar. When they saw the priceless Codex Sinaiticus, Ettinghausen remarked to his hosts, “If you ever want to sell it, let me know." Some time later, Maggs received a postcard saying that the Soviet government would be prepared to sell the Codex Sinaiticus for 200,000 pounds. The British group countered with 40,000 pounds. Finally, a price of 100,000 pounds was agreed upon. This was the largest price that had ever been paid for a book. It was an enormous sum at the time. [In 1933] The British government agreed to pay half the amount and guaranteed the remainder if it were not raised by public subscription." (Wikipedia article on Maggs Bros., accessed 08-02-2009).

♦ From Rosenbach: A Biography by Wolf & Fleming (1960)367-68:

"Some preliminary negotiations were under way with Amtorg [in 1932] for the Codex Sainaiticus, the fourth-century manuscript of the Bible which had been in Russia since its discoverer, Tischendorf, acquired it for the Czar in 1869, and which the Communists, interested in neither its contents nor its provenance, wanted to sell. It was a volume before which the the Doctor's flow of words was inadequate. It was simply the most important, exciting, and valuable book in existence; except for fragments, it was one of the three oldest manuscripts of the Bible known. To have handled it would have added luster to any reputation. In the dickering stage, Dr. Rosenbach told the Russians that the asking price of $1,600,000 was too high, but he hung on the fringes of the deal by assuring them in confidence, 'that I might interest some of our wealthy clients in its purchase for presentation purposes, if the price could be lowered considerably.'

"Ah, perfidious Moscow! Before the end of the next year Ramsay MacDonald announced the purchase of the Codex by the British Museum for £100,000. The news found the Doctor astonished and disappointed. It had been offered to him for $1,250,000, he told the Herald Tribune, and he could not understand how the British Museum had obtained it for less than half that figure. . . ."

[In July 2008 it was stated on the Codex Sinaiticus website that the "recent" history of the manuscript would be revised in light of previously unavailable documents.]

In 1859 Edward Edwards, former librarian of the Manchester Free Library, the first library opened under the 1850 Public Libraries Act, the passage of which was in no small part due to efforts by Edwards, published Memoirs of Libraries: Including A Handbook of Library Economy.  The first roughly 1400 pages of this work of approximately 1900 pages, published in two thick octavo volumes, consisted of a series of interrelated chapters which covered the development of libraries from the earliest times to the mid-19th century. Because of its unusual arrangement it is debatable whether or not Edwards' book is the first comprehensive "history" of libraries. It is certainly the first large, comprehensive collection of historical essays on the subject in English, and it contains a wealth of information difficult to find elsewhere. The final 500 pages consisted of what Edwards called "A Handbook of Library Economy"—a manual on how to run an institutional library.

Edwards continued his writings on the history of libraries in a collection of essays entitled Libraries and Founders of Libraries (1865).

In 1885, the year before his death, Edwards issued a second revised edition of the first 400 pages of Memoirs of Libraries as Memoirs of Libraries of Museums; and of Archives; (Public and Private); and of Some of Their Chief Founders, Collectors, Keepers.  Of the 500 copies printed of this second edition, a good number must have remained in sheets at the author's death. Those were reissued by Thomas Greenwood for presentation, with a new title page and frontispiece, in 1901.

Greenwood, Edward Edwards, The Chief Pioneer of Municipal Public Libraries (1902).  Munford, Edward Edwards 1812-1886. Portrait of a Librarian (1963).

At the end of the American Civil War, The Library of the Surgeon General's Office, along with the new Surgeon General's office, was, perhaps with some irony, moved to Ford's Theater, site of the tragic assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. 

The theater had been closed and remodelled in the intervening two years. The new Office/Library site was taken over by the U.S. Army to house important post-Civil War medical activities of the Surgeon General's Office. These included the archive of Civil War medical records (essential for verification of veterans' pension claims) and the Army Medical Museum. The archive of case records, pathological specimens and photographs gathered by the Army Medical Museum was compiled by Joseph J. Woodward, Charles Smart, George A. Otis, and David Huntington under the direction of then Surgeon General of the Army, Joseph K. Barnes, into the six massive volumes of The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, which were published between 1870 and 1888. This encyclopedic work has been called the "first comprehensive American medical book."

Charles Babbage’s scientific library was sold at auction in 1872. The auction catalogue, containing over two thousand items on topics such as mathematical tables, cryptography, and calculating machines, and including many rare volumes, may be the first catalogue of a library on computing and its history.

American antiquarian bookseller and bibliographer Henry Stevens published an auction catalogue of books, manuscripts, maps, and charts verbosely titled as follows:

Bibliotheca geographica & historica or a catalogue of a nine days sale of rare & valuable ancient and modern books maps charts manuscripts autograph letters et cetera illustrative of historical geography & geographical history general and local. . . collected used and described. With an introduction on the progress of geography and notes annotatiunculae [sic] on sundry subjects together with an essay upon the Stevens system of photobibliography. Part I. To be dispersed by auction . . . [in] London the 19th to 29th November 1872.

In his essay introductory to the catalogue entitled Photobibliography. A Word on Catalogues and How to Make Them Stevens calls for "A Central Bibliographical Bureau" which would produce standard bibliographical descriptions of items that could be used by other cataloguers and bibliographers.  Analogous to what later became national union catalogues of books, Stevens imagined that this could "be made self-supporting or even remunerative, like the Post Office."  He also called for a standardized system of recording reduced size images called "photograms" of books according to "one uniform scale." This would reduce "all the titles, maps, woodcuts, or whatever is desired to copy" to fit the images onto standardized filing cards on which bibliographical details could be written by hand, to spare the bibliographer the time and effort of transcribing title pages.  Negatives would be stored compactly, and prints made for reproduction in printed catalogues, etc. As examples Stevens had an albumen print of a title page pasted in as the frontispiece of the auction catalogue, plus a small circular photograph of "Ptolemy's World by Mercator" pasted onto the title page.   Stevens noted the he also made available a few copies of the auction catalogue on thicker paper with about 400 pasted-on "photograms."

Stevens later expanded on this idea in a paper entitled "Photobibliography, or a Central Bibliographical Clearing-House" presented to the 1877 Conference of Librarians held in London (see "Transactions and Proceedings of the Conference", pp. 70-81).

In 1878 Stevens published privately a 16mo pamphlet of 49pp. entitled, Photo-Bibliography; or, a Word on Printed Card Catalogues of old, rare, beautiful, and costly books, and how to make them on a Co-operative System; and Two Words on the Establishment of a Central Bibliographical Bureau, or Clearing-house, for Librarians.  Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing (1880) III, 401.

In 1876 librarian Melvil Dewey published anonymously from Amherst, Massachusetts Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library. This became known as the Dewey Decimal Classification.  In 1885 Dewey published the second edition of his classification system, identifying himself as author for the first time. The Dewey Decimal Classification became the world's most widely used library classification system.

Charles Ammi Cutter, librarian at the Boston Athenaeum published Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue, the last library cataloguing code written by one person.

"In his prefatory note, Cutter claimed to be the first investigator of the 'first principles of cataloguing' and the first to 'set forth the rules in a systematic way.' One of the principles he expostulated was that 'the convenience of the user should be preferred to the ease of the cataloguer.' Cutter urged catalogers to do such things as select the customary use of the names of subjects and the best known form of the author's name so that this goal might be fulfilled. The code's introduction lists objectives and means to bring about this convenience. These objectives and means have been studied for years by students of cataloging code history. Exactly how the 'convenience of the user' would be determined Cutter did not specify; he himself, it would seem, relied upon his own experience rather than any systematic study of user needs or behavior. No one else did such a study during these years either: such things as survey research and transaction log analysis were twentieth century phenomena" (J. R. Hufford, The Pragmatic Basis of Catalog Codes: Has the User Been Ignored? [2007] 29]

Among the most unusual of library organizations:

"Lighthouses were often time located in remote areas and as such had no access to city services such as libraries, opera houses, entertainment, etc. that most people enjoyed who lived in a town or city. As light keeping was a lonely profession in most cases supplies were brought to them by lighthouse tender ships. One of the items the tender supplied was a library box on each visit as pictured to the left. Library boxes were filled with books and switched from station to station to supply different reading materials to the families.

"In 1876 portable libraries were first introduced in the Light-House Establishment and furnished to all light vessels and inaccessible offshore light stations with a selection of reading materials. These libraries were contained in a portable wooden case, each with a printed listing of the contents posted inside the door. Proper arrangements were made for the exchange of these libraries at intervals, and for revision of the contents as books became obsolete in accordance with suggestions obtained from public library authorities" (http://www.michiganlights.com/lhlibrary.htm, accessed 11-19-2010).

The American Library Association (ALA) was founded in Philadelphia on October 6, 1876.

The American Library Association, headquartered in Philadelphia, urged on by Melvil Dewey, standardized the size of library catalogue cards.

At this time most libraries had their main catalogue in book form.

Under the direction of John Shaw Billings, the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (to be redesignated in 1956 the National Library of Medicine) began publication of the Index Medicus—  an effort to index all of medical periodical literature.

Index Medicus finally ceased publication in print in 2004.

John Shaw Billings began publication of the The Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office. This became a landmark in the history of efforts to organize information and to make it searchable, and a primary general reference for the history of medicine and science. The fifith and final series was issued in 1961. The finished set of printed books contained "over 4.5 million. . . references to over 3.7 million bibliographic items.  2.5 million items are primarily journal articles; 250,000 items are monographs (books, pamphlets, and reports); approximately 300,000 items are dissertations (theses); and 16,000 are journal titles. Series 1 and Series 2 include portraits as separate citations but Series 3, 4, and 5 indicate portraits in descriptive notes for monographs and dissertations."

The Catalogue of Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum was published in 393 parts from 1881-1900, followed by a Supplement in 44 parts published from 1900-05. Various other supplements were later published.

This was the first iteration of the complete British Museum catalogue implementing Antonio Panizzi's 91 Rules, promulgated in 1841, for standardizing the cataloguing of printed books. 

"The General Catalogue is, by common consent, a research tool of undisputed importance for historians of European civilisation from the invention of printing to the present day. Its utility and the universal esteem in which it is held derive from two principal factors: the richness of the collections it seeks to describe, and the principles underying the methods of that description. Unlike most library catalogues which provide access to collections via the main entry-points of author title, the General Catalogue has, from the beginning, sought rather to incoprorate the best traditions of German analytic cataloguing into the general framework of an author catalogue. The logic of its structure is derived from thesaural rather than lexical principles. Generations of scholars have testified to the benefits for research which its rich contextual organisation make possible. The juxtaposition of related materials, frequently arranged in a chronological rather than merely alphabetic sequence (in recognition of the scholar's needs), is a feature designed to encourage a systematic and exploratory respone from the user. Thus, the search for a specific item (especially if that item was published anonymously) can yield a rich and perhaps unsuspected harvest of related items, and opportunities for discovery are further multiplied by the elaborate system of cross-references between authors and headings. The format of the catalogue was itself devised to encourage the user to explore sequences of entries rather than to focus upon the individual entry. It is as though Panizzi conceived of books as members of a vast related community and obligingly sought to demonstrate their relationship within the constraints of a library catalogue. For certain kinds of anonymous publication, Panizzi's rules were designed to allow a subject approach, based on the wording of the title page. But within such headings the sequences are where possible based on historical principles. Such familiar collective headings as:- ENGLAND, FRANCE, AMERICA; LONDON, ROME, PARIS; BIBLE, LITURGIES; GEORGE III, LOUIS XIV, PIUS IX, PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS- represent the imposition of an historically understood order upon a considerable body of heterogeneous publications. For the user in search of a specific anonymous title the catalogue's disposition to arrange items in an historical context (derived from a significant element within the title) can be frustrating if only the first few words of the title are known, or if the cataloguing principles for choice of heading are imprefectly understood. But the alternative, now widely regarded as standard, procedure of entering anonymous titles under first word, while facilitating access to individual works (the title-index to ENGLAND is undoubtedly invaluable) distributes irrecoverably related items frequently crucial to the user's requirements. It is clear that for the collections of a major research library multiple access is desirable, but for a machine-readble catalogue such as ESTC the search possibilitied provided by the computer fortunately make these problems less acute" (Alston & Jannetta, Bibliography, Machine-Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC [1978] 20).

Charles Ammi Cutter, Librarian of the Boston Atheneum, and author of Cutter Expansive Classification, published a short story entitled The Buffalo Public Library in 1983. In it he predicted how a library would operate one hundred years into the future. Here is a selection:

“ 'But what,' he continued, 'will be a novelty to you, is the listening-room, where works, of which we have fonografic editions prepared by the best readers, are read by machines, often to crowded audiences. The rooms are distributed all over the city, fifty or more, and we are intending to increase the number. People go to them with their whole families, except to those where smoking is allowed, which are frequented for the most part by men alone. There they listen to the reading of a story or an entertaining history or biografy, or book of travels, or a work of popular science. Sometimes one work occupies the whole evening, sometimes selections are read. The program for the whole city is advertised in the papers each day. The reading-machines have reached such a pitch of perfection that it is as if one were listening to an agreeable elocutionist. I prefer to do my own reading, but there are many whose eyes are weak, or who do not read with ease, or have not comfortable homes, or do not own the book that is to be read, or prefer to listen in company. We are very particular about the ventilation. We do not want any one to go to sleep.” I asked him whether he thought these readings gave any real instruction, or only amusement. He admitted that an exciting novel would draw better than anything else, but said that they did not allow the selection to run too much to fiction. 'In the circulation of books we have to follow the public taste, but in these listening-rooms we have the matter more in our control. Of course we must select bright books which the people will come to hear. Dull books must be rigidly excluded; but that is not difficult, because no dull book is published in reading-machine editions. Yes, I think a great deal of information is spread that way, and at any rate they are a valuable rival to the dram-shops, and keep many a young man out of bad places. The readings are usually in the evening. Where a school-room is used for the purpose it must be so; but, for our own branches, we have a rule that if ten people ask for a reading in the day-time it shall be granted, with any book they choose. When trade is dull there are readings going on all day.'

"I omit many details in which their ways did not differ much from ours, — the book-trucks, the fall-power lifts just large enough for one person, the means of communication between all parts of the building by telefone or pneumatic tubes, or in any other way that the situation required. Their intention was to make the work easy and quick, and to reduce time and space as nearly as possible to zero. I cannot stop to describe the arrangements for allowing the public access to the shelves. But I may mention that the library was open every day in the year, without any exception; that one study-room was kept open as late at night as anybody wanted it, and on several occasions, when there was a special need, it had been kept open all night.

“ 'One other practical point: The fonograf,' I was told, 'plays a great part in our library work. If Boston or Philadelphia has a rare book from which we wish extracts, instead of having it sent on with the risk of loss, we have a fonografic foil made of the desired passages, which are read off to us, or, if we pay a little more, are sent on. In the latter case, a duplicate, made by a new process, is kept at the library, so that librarians gradually accumulate fonografic reproductions of all their rarest books, and when they are called for have only to put the foil in the machine and have it read off through the wires to the end of the Union. All the libraries in the country, you see, are practically one library.' ”

In 1883 Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated his first public library to his hometown of Dunfermine, Scotland. Making books more widely available through the construction of public libraries became a major philanthropic cause for the remainder of Carnegie's life.

Between 1883 and 1929 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built, including some belonging to public and university library systems. 1,689 were built in the United States, 660 in Britain and Ireland, 125 in Canada, and others in Australia, New Zealand, Serbia, the Caribbean, and Fiji. Few towns that requested a grant and agreed to Carnegie's terms were refused. When the last grant was made in 1919, the year of Carnegie's death, there were 3,500 libraries in the United States, nearly half of them built with construction grants funded by Carnegie.

Press manufacturer and book collector, Robert Hoe, and eight of his book collector friends founded The Grolier Club in New York. It became the leading society of bibliophiles in the United States, and a leading venue for exhibitions relating to book history.

The library of The Grolier Club became a leading research center for book history, for the history of libraries, the history of book collecting and the book trade.

In 1887 Melvil Dewey established the first library school at Columbia University. It was originally known as the School of Library Economy of Columbia College.  

On its 50th anniversary in 1937 the library school, by then known as the School of Library Service of Columbia University, published a volume containing reproductions of the founding documents of the school under the title of School of Library Economy of Columbia College 1887-1889. Documents for a History. This substantial quarto volume of 271 pages was issued in an edition of 400 copies. From this we learn that Dewey's first paper on the need for systematic preparation for librarianship, with suggestions on how to provide it, concerned improving the traditional method of apprenticeship training: "Apprenticeship of Librarians," Library Journal V, No. 4 (May 31, 1879) 147-48. By 1883 Dewey's ideas had advanced to sufficiently that he proposed the creation for a library school at Columbia College at a conference of the American Library Association at Buffalo, New York on August 16, 1883. In this paper, "School of Library Economy," Library Journal V, No. 8, (September-October 1883) 285-90, Dewey gave the school its original name. According to the first brief published report on school operation published in Library Notes in March 1887 the school began with a class of 20 students.

In 1895 Belgian author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist Paul Otlet and Belgian professor of international law and legislator Henri La Fontaine founded the Institut International de Bibliographie in Brussels. In this organization they began the creation of a system of 3 x 5 index cards cataloguing facts that became known as the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU). By the end of 1895 it had grown to 400,000 entries. Eventually it reached 16 million cards.  The goal was to organize all the knowledge of the world.

To organize the cards Otlet and La Fontaine developed the Universal Decimal Classification based on the Dewey Decimal Classification, but using auxiliary signs to indicate various special aspects of a subject and relationships between subjects. "It thus contains a significant faceted or analytico-synthetic element, and is used especially in specialist libraries. UDC has been modified and extended through the years to cope with the increasing output in all disciplines of human knowledge, and is still under continuous review to take account of new developments" (Wikipedia article on Universal Decimal Classification, accessed 03-13-2012).

"In 1896, Otlet set up a fee-based service to answer questions by mail, by sending the requesters copies of the relevant index cards for each query; scholar Alex Wright has referred to the service as an 'analog search engine'. By 1912, this service responded to over 1,500 queries a year. Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search.

"Otlet envisioned a copy of the RBU in each major city around the world, with Brussels holding the master copy. At various times between 1900 and 1914, attempts were made to send full copies of the RBU to cities such as Paris, Washington, D.C. and Rio de Janeiro; however, difficulties in copying and transportation meant that no city received more than a few hundred thousand cards" (Wikipedia article on Paul Otlet, accessed 03-02-2009).

Following World War I, in 1920 the organization, then called the Mundaneum, opened in the left wing of the palace of the Cinquantenaire de Bruxelles called the Palais Mondial-Mundaneum.

In 1931 the Institut International de Bibliographie was renamed the Institut International de Documentation, IID.  World War II and the deaths of La Fontaine in 1943 and Otlet in 1944 slowed the project. Although many of the cards were stored, some of them in the Brussels subway, volunteers kept the dream alive. In 1998, Belgium’s French community government revived the Mundaneum’s memory, bringing most of the archives to a beautiful Art Deco building in the city of Mons.

During 1896 and 1897 Solomon Schechter, reader in Talmudic Studies at Cambridge, heard of discoveries of important early Hebrew manuscripts, and travelled to Egypt where, with the financial assistance of Charles Taylor, he purchased what he considered the most significant portion of the contents of the genizah (Geniza), a sacred storeroom in the loft of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, presently Old Cairo.

"According to rabbinic law (see, for instance, Mishna Shabbat 16:1), once a holy book can no longer be used (because it is too old, or because its text is no longer relevant) it cannot be destroyed or casually discarded: texts containing the name of God should be buried or, if burial is not possible, placed in a genizah.  

"At least from the early 11th century, the Jews of Fustat, one of the most important and richest Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world, reverently placed their old texts in the Genizah. Remarkably, however, they placed not only the expected religious works, such as Bibles, prayer books and compendia of Jewish law, but also what we would regard as secular works and everyday documents: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, pages from Arabic fables, works of Sufi and Shi'ite philosophy, medical books, magical amulets, business letters and accounts, and hundreds of letters: examples of practically every kind of written text produced by the Jewish communities of the Near East can now be found in the Genizah Collection, and it presents an unparalleled insight into the medieval Jewish world" (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah, accessed 12-14-2012).

Schechter sent back to Cambridge about 193,000 manuscripts from the genizah. These became the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library. In 2012 this entire collection was in the process of being digitized and placed online as part of the Cambridge Digital Library.

        When Schechter assumed the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York in 1902 he brought an additional collection of manuscripts from the genizah to that library. Currently the Jewish Theological Seminary holds about 40,000 manuscripts or fragments from the Cairo genizah. An additional 11,000 fragments are at the John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester, purchased from the estate of Dr. Moses Gaster in 1954. Smaller portions are preserved in other universities around the world.

"The Cairo Genizah, mostly discovered late in the nineteenth century but still resurfacing in our own day, is a collection of over 200,000 fragmentary Jewish texts (which may well equal three times that number of folios). Many of these were stored in the loft of the ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat medieval Cairo, to the south-west of the modern city) between the 11th and 19th centuries. A genizah is a storage room where copies of respected texts with scribal errors or physical damaged, or unusable documents, are kept until they can be ritually buried. The dark, sealed, room in the arid Egyptian climate contributed to the preservation of the documents, the earliest of which may go back to the eighth and ninth centuries.

"These manuscripts outline a 1,000-year continuum of Middle-Eastern history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world. The Genizah can be described as one of the greatest Jewish treasures ever found.

"Early visitors to the Genizah were wary of examining its contents because of the local superstition that foretold disaster for anyone who might remove any of its contents. This, too, contributed to the preservation of the documents.

"In the second half of the 19th century some texts were sold by synagogue officials to dealers, scholars and visitors. Famous libraries in St. Petersburg, Paris, London, Oxford, Cambridge and Philadelphia acquired major collections.

"In the early 1890's Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer, a Torah scholar, collector and researcher, living in Jerusalem, began publishing manuscripts that he had purchased from the Cairo Genizah with his identifications and explanations – among them rare and important texts. He also sold some of these manuscripts to collectors in order to finance the purchase of additional ones. To some extent, he was one of the first to recognize the treasure trove that was the Cairo Genizah."

These quotations were from the website of the Friedberg Genizah Project, an effort underway in Jerusalem to digitize and preserve all surviving portions of the Cairo Genizah from around the world.

Before he was appointed Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, with the assistance of Charles Ammi Cutter, developed the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). This and the Dewey Decimal Classification became the most widely used systems of library classification.

In his annual report for 1898 Librarian of Congress John Russell Young commented on the "questionable quality of the paper upon which so much of the Library material is printed." Referring to the wood pulp paper that is inferior to paper previously made from linen rags, Young warned that many of the works coming into the Library "threaten in a few years to crumble into a waste heap, with no value as record."

Bookseller Halsey William Wilson of Minneapolis published the first issue of the Cumulative Book Index. 

"As a bookseller, Wilson had to constantly search through publishers' catalogs in order to keep track of currently published books that his customers might want. It was tedious and time-consuming work that prompted him to long for a comprehensive, up-to-date index of published works. He eventually decided to create such an index himself. What made the concept work economically was Wilson's idea to keep the publication current by placing each entry on a printer's "slug," which could then be later sorted with slugs from new entries. It may have been an obvious solution to someone who had experience as a job printer, but it was a revolutionary concept in bibliographical publishing. In February 1898 Wilson first published Cumulative Book Index, a comprehensive alphabetic list of currently published books in English, featuring the key elements of future Wilson indexes: the listing of author, title, and subject. The work sold for $1 to 300 subscribers, who would then receive periodically updated versions."

Bookseller and bibliographer Halsey William Wilson of Minneapolis published the first issue of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.

In 1901 German scientist, philosopher and science fiction writer Kurd Lasswitz at Gotha, Germany published a story entitled Die Universalbibliothek, describing a library which was universal in the sense that it not only contained all existing written works, but all possible written works.

"In 1901 Kurd Lasswitz wrote a short story, 'The Universal Library,' elaborated upon by Jorge Luis Borges as 'The Library of Babel' in 1941. 'When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness,' Borges explained. 'All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose solution did not exist.' Borges described the library in magical tones, whereas Lasswitz, a mathematician as well as a philosopher, got down to practical details. 'You say that everything will be in the library? The complete works of Goethe? The Bible? The works of all the classical philosophers?" Professor Wallhausen's companion, the magazine editor Max Burkel, asked. 'Yes, and with all the variations in wording nobody has thought up yet. You'll find the lost works of Tacitus and their translations into all living and dead languages. Furthermore, all of my and my friend Burkel's future works, all forgotten and still undelivered speeches in all parliaments, the official version of the Universal Declaration of Peace, the history of all the subsequent wars...'

" 'I'm going to subscribe right now,' Burkel exclaimed. 'This will furnish me with all the future volumes of my magazine; I won't have to read manuscripts any more!' Professor Wallhausen decided to calculate how many volumes (a large but finite number) the universal library would have to contain.  ' 'Will you — ' he turned to his daughter — 'hand me a sheet of paper and a pencil from my desk?' Max Burkel added, 'Bring the logarithm table too.' After a few minutes Wallhausen had the result, and wrote it down: 10^2,000,000.

" 'You make your life easy,' remarked Mrs. Wallhausen. 'Why don't you write it down in the normal manner?'

" 'Not me. This would take me at least two weeks, without time out for food and sleep. If you printed that figure, it would be a little over two miles long.'

' 'What is the name of that figure?' the daughter wanted to know.

"It has no name," Wallhausen replied.

"The number of books in the Universal Library lies somewhere between a googol (10^100) and a googolplex (10^googol), numbers which were named, by 8-year-old Milton Sirotta and his uncle Edward Kasner, in 1938. In Lasswitz's tale, Wallhausen went on to demonstrate that there would not be enough room in the visible universe to contain all possible printed books. Editor Max Burkel's hope for the 'elimination of the author from the literary business' was doomed" (Edge: The Third Culture, "The Universal Library" by George Dyson, 11.30.05, accessed 05-25-2009).

The Library of Congress began making printed Library of Congress catalogue cards (LC cards) available to libraries, thus promoting the development of catalogue card systems.

German anthropologist, ornithologist, and entomologist, and Director of the Royal Zoological, Anthropological and Ethnographical Museum in Dresden, Adolf Bernard Meyer, published "Studies of the Museums and Kindred Institutions of New York City, Albany, Buffalo, and Chicago, with Notes on Some European Institutions". This appeared in the Report of the United States National Museum [Smithsonian Institution] for 1903, pp. 311-608, with forty plates. It was a translation revised by the author of studies he first published in German in 1900-02, and 1902-03.

Meyer's work was a pioneering illustrated study of the main museums of science and art in the United States and Europe as well as a survey of major research libraries in both America and Europe.  It includes striking images of building exteriors and interiors either no longer in existence or which have been extensively modified, and it also contains images of state of the art museum displays from the time.

In 1907 engineer Robert Goldschmidt and Belgian author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist Paul Otlet published "Sur une forme nouvelle du livre-- le livre microphotographique" in l'Institut international de bibliographie bulletin. In this paper they "proposed the livre microphotographique as a way to alleviate the cost and space limitations imposed by the codex format. Otlet’s overarching goal was to create a World Center Library of Juridical, Social and Cultural Documentation, and he saw microfiche as way to offer a stable and durable format that was inexpensive, easy to use, easy to reproduce, and extremely compact" (Wikipedia article on Microform, accessed 04-26-2009). 

Historian of Mathematics David Eugene Smith published Rara arithmetica: A Catalogue of the Arithmetics Written Before the Year MDC! with a Description of Those in the Library of George Arthur Plimpton of New York. This two-volume work, issued by Plimpton's textbook publishing company, Ginn & Company, described and illustrated Plimpton's library of early mathematical books and medieval manuscripts before 1601.  Two versions of the catalogue were published:

1. A deluxe numbered edition limited to 151 copies printed on handmade paper and bound in full vellum, elaborately gilt, in two volumes, with the plates printed in color on Japan vellum, enclosed in a slipcase
2. A trade edition of indeterminate number, printed on regular paper and bound in one volume in cloth-backed boards. 
   

Plimpton’s mathematical library, preserved at Columbia University Library, is the first specialized private collection of antiquarian scientific books formed by an American for which we have an annotated bibliographical catalogue.  Smith also discussed some of Plimpton’s early manuscripts in his History of Mathematics (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1923–25), and issued a pamphlet addendum to his catalogue of Plimpton’s library in 1939 (Rara arithmetica: Addenda to “Rara arithmetica" [Boston: Ginn & Co.]).

Plimpton did not comment on his library in any of Smith’s works, all, or nearly all of which were published by Plimpton's Ginn & Company. The only place where I find published remarks by Plimpton on his mathematical library is in “The History of Elementary Mathematics in the Plimpton Library", Atti del Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici Bologna 3–10 Settembre 1928, VI (1932) 433–42.

In 1909 William D. Weaver published Catalogue of the Wheeler Gift of Books, Pamphlets, and Periodicals in the Library of the American Institute of Engineers.With Introduction, Descriptive and Critical Notes by Brother Potamian. This 2-volume work, which remains the most comprehensive historical bibliography on the subjects, described primarily the library of Latimer Clark, a British electrical engineer and inventor working in London who, in partnership with Sir Charles Tilson Bright, was responsible for laying many of the first submarine telegraphic cables. While pursuing a remarkably successful and creative scientific and entrepeneurial career, Clark also found time to build one of the most complete collections ever formed of early books and manuscripts on the history of electricity and magnetism, including virtually every known publication in English on these subjects prior to 1886.

In collecting the history of electricity and telegraphy Clark followed in the path of Francis Ronalds, another telegraphy pioneer who assembled a somewhat smaller library on the subjects, the catalogue of which appeared in 1880. Nearly coincident with the publication of the catalogue of the Ronalds Library, in 1881 Francesco Rossetti and Giovanni Cantoni issued Bibliografia Italiana di Elettricità e Magnetismo, on the occasion of an international fair on electricity held in Paris in 1881. This briefly annotated bibliography presented the history of the Italian literature on the subject.

In 1901 Clark's library was purchased by the American engineer, Schulyer Skaats Wheeler, and donated by him to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE]) in New York. The extensively annotated and illustrated catalogue of the collection of 5,966 items, edited by William Weaver and annotated by Brother Potamian, was financed by Andrew Carnegie. Though the title page of the catalogue takes no notice of it, a high percentage of the items in Clark's library, particularly the final 2000 items, concern telegraphy.

♦ Problematic Management of the Latimer Clark Library in the Twentieth Century:

"In 1913 the Engineering Societies Library was established in New York City, a joint venture of the AIEE, the ASME (Mechanical Engineers), and the AIME (Mining Engineers), funded by a $1.5 million gift from Andrew Carnegie. The AIEE’s main contribution to the Library was the Wheeler Gift Collection. For many years the collection was accessible according to the terms above, but in the 1990s the ESL decided that it could no longer maintain its Manhattan premises and closed the library there.

"By that time the Wheeler Gift Collection had been merged with other works at the library, and had suffered from neglect over the years, much of the material being kept in poor physical conditions. A 1985 survey of the collection showed about 9% (532 items) were missing, and it seems unlikely that the situation improved in the following ten years, prior to the dispersion of the collection.

"Constrained by the terms of the Gift to keep the collection in New York City, the ESL boxed up whatever could be definitely identified as part of the original Wheeler Gift and in 1995 sent 205 cartons of books and papers to the Humanities and Social Sciences division of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. The rest of the collection, including items in the 1909 catalog that were part of the Wheeler Gift but did not have identifying labels, went to Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, MO"(http://atlantic-cable.com/CablePioneers/LatimerClark.htm, accessed 07-31-2009).

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) No. 211.

In 1911 Karl Wilhelm Bührer and Adolf Saager published Die Organisierung der geistigen Arbeit durch die Brücke (The Organization of Intellectual Work through the Bridge) from Ansbach, Germany. This book described the aims of Die Brücke, Internationales Institut zur Organisierung der geistigen Arbeit (The Bridge, International Institute for the Organization of Intellectual Work), an institution founded in Munich on 11 June 1911 with the financial support of chemist Wilhelm Ostwald who donated his Nobel Prize money for the purpose.  In 1910 Ostwald had discussed problems of information management with Paul Otlet, co-founder of the Institut International de Bibliographie in Brussels. After only two years of existence The Bridge ended in 1913. It published numerous pamphlets, and perhaps the chief legacy of the project was the international standard for paper sizes (A4 etc.)

Concerning The Bridge Thomas Hapke wrote:

" 'Die Brücke is planned as a central station, where any question which may be raised with respect to any field of intellectual work whatever finds either direct answer or else indirect, in the sense that the inquirer is advised as to the place where he can obtain sufficient information' (Ostwald, 1913, p. 6, English original).

"The Bridge was supposed to be the information office for the information offices, a 'bridge' between the 'islands' where all other institutions—associations, societies, libraries, museums, companies, and individuals— 'were working for culture and civilization' (Die Brücke, 1910–1911). The organization of intellectual work was intended to occur 'automatically' through the general introduction of standardized means of communication— the monographic principle, standardized formats, and uniform indexing (Registraturvermerke) for all publications. The following facilities were planned: a collection of addresses, a Brückenarchiv as a 'comprehensive, illustrated world encyclopedia on sheets of standardized formats,' which should contain a world dictionary and a world museum catalog; a rückenmuseum; and a head office and Hochschule (college) for organization. 'Close cooperation' with the Institut Internationale de Bibliographie in Brussels was also planned."

As they plundered the city of Leuven, the invading German Army destroyed the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, the oldest and most prominent university in Belgium, founded in 1425 by Pope Martin V.

Along with the historic libary building about 300,000 books, and an untold number of manuscripts, including irreplaceable medieval and renaissance treasures, were lost. The destruction of this library was part of brutal retaliations by the Germans for the extensive activity of "francs-tireurs" against the occupying forces.

The number of titles of fifteenth century books (incunabula) present in North American libraries at this time: 6,292. Number of copies: 13,200. (Goff, Incunabula in American Libraries, 3rd census [1964] xv.).

In 1925 Robert B. Goldschmidt and Paul Otlet published "La Conservation et la diffusion internationale de la pensée" as publication no. 144 of the Institut international de bibliographie (Brussels). This work described their plans for a massive library where each volume existed as master negatives and positives on microform, and where items were printed on demand for interested patrons.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) was founded in Edinburgh, Scotland.

London antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros. issued Catalogue of Medical Works from the Library of Dr. Nicholaus Pol, Born c1470; Court Physician to the Emperor Maximilian I. Maggs further characterized the 34 items offered in the catalogue as "A remarkable collection of 'Editiones principes' and other early editions of Medical Authors, Classical, Arabian, and medieval from famous early presses of France and Italy in the original Gothic Bindings executed for Dr. Pol".

The asking price for the collection—£2500, even when the pound equalled nearly $5— seems exceptionally reasonable today, considering the optimal significance and quality of the books involved.

The catalogue was bought in its entirely by the Cleveland Medical Library and it is preserved in the Howard Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University.

"Through a clerical error, Dr. Harvey Cushing did not receive a copy of the catalogue, but his nephew Dr. Edward H. Cushing of Cleveland did. He promptly persuaded President Vinson of Western Reserve University to cable for the collection and hold it until the Cleveland Medical Library Association could raise the money. This was soon supplied by a donor who asked to be nameless, and the collection came to rest in the Cleveland Medical Library as a memorial to Mr. Charles H. Bingham" (http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/dittrick/site2/books/pol.html, accessed 08--02-2009).

In 1930 the Library of Congress began to print Dewey Classification System numbers on library catalogue cards.

In a paper entitled "Sources of Information on Specific Subjects," (Engineering 137 [1934], 85-6), British mathematician, librarian and documentalist at the Science Museum in London Samuel C. Bradford published Bradford's Law, also known as  "Bradford's law of scattering" and as the "Bradford distribution," showing the "exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search."

"In many disciplines this pattern [described by Bradford's Law] is called a Pareto distribution. As a practical example, suppose that a researcher has five core scientific journals for his or her subject. Suppose that in a month there are 12 articles of interest in those journals. Suppose further that in order to find another dozen articles of interest, the researcher would have to go to an additional 10 journals. Then that researcher's Bradford multiplier bm is 2 (i.e. 10/5). For each new dozen articles, that researcher will need to look in bm times as many journals. After looking in 5, 10, 20, 40, etc. journals, most researchers quickly realize that there is little point in looking further.

"Different researchers have different numbers of core journals, and different Bradford multipliers. But the pattern holds quite well across many subjects, and may well be a general pattern for human interactions in social systems. Like Zipf's law, to which it is related, we do not have a good explanation for why it works. But knowing that it does is very useful for librarians. What it means is that for each specialty it is sufficient to identify the core publications' for that field and only stock those. Very rarely will researchers need to go outside that set" (Wikipedia article on Bradford's Law, accessed 02-21-2012).

In 1936 H. G. Wells issued a pamphlet of 32 pages entitled The Idea of a World Encyclopaedia, publishing a lecture he had delivered at The Royal Institution on November 20, 1936. The lecture was republished in the United States in the April 1937 issue of Harpers Magazine.  

In 1938 Methuen publishers issued a volume of Wells's essays and speeches on this theme entitled World Brain. In this book his 1936 speech was renamed simply "World Encyclopedia."  The 1938 book included an essay entitled "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia." This essay first appeared in the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937. Another essay in the book entitled "The Brain Organization of the Modern World" described Wells' vision for

". . .a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared." (p. 49)

Wells believed that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized towards this end so that

"any student, in any part of the world, would be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica" (p. 54).

In his ideas for a "mental clearing house" Wells was probably influenced by "Die Brucke" and its Goals for a World Information Clearing House.

Pages 72-73 of World Brain reproduced an early information graphic entitled "Knowledge Correlated through a World Encyclopaedia."

♦Aspects of Wells's vision were eventually realized on the Internet through the Wikipedia in ways that Wells could not have imagined. 

Börner, Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know (2010) 25ff.

In 1939 Argentine writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires published an essay entitled La bibliotheca total (The Total Library), describing his fantasy of an all-encompassing archive or universal library.
In Borges' work this universal library was created, remarkably, by an abstract device that produced a random sequence of letters and symbols, ad infinitum. In his essay Borges

"traced the infinite-monkey concept back to Aristotle's Metaphysics. Explaining the views of Leucippus, who held that the world arose through the random combination of atoms, Aristotle notes that the atoms themselves are homogeneous and their possible arrangements only differ in shape, position and ordering. In De Generatione et corruptione (On Generation and Corruption), the Greek philosopher compares this to the way that a tragedy and a comedy consist of the same "atoms", i.e., alphabetic characters. Three centuries later, Cicero's De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) argued against the atomist worldview:

" 'He who believes this may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them.'

"Borges follows the history of this argument through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, then observes that in his own time, the vocabulary had changed. By 1939, the idiom was 'that a half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum.' (To which Borges adds, 'Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would suffice.') Borges then imagines the contents of the Total Library which this enterprise would produce if carried to its fullest extreme:

" 'Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page' " (Wikipedia article on Infinite Monkey Theorem, accessed 05-25-2009).

The day that German troops marched into Poland German Jew Alfred Wiener opened the Jewish Central Information Office in London.  This library, which was later called the "oldest holocaust museum," functioned during World War II as a private intelligence service, and Wiener was paid by British government departments for keeping them informed of developments in Germany.

In 1919 Wiener was a high-ranking official in the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, CV). As early as 1925 he identified the Nazi Party as the chief danger to the Jews of Germany and to German society as a whole. In 1933, Wiener fled Germany for Amsterdam. Together with Prof. David Cohen, he set up the Jewish Central Information Office, collecting and disseminating information about events happening in Nazi Germany. In 1939 Wiener transferred the library to London, and Wiener made the resources available to the British and other governments' intelligence departments, and the international press, especially the BBC. The library soon became known as "Dr Wiener's Library" and the name was adopted. After the end of World War II, the library used its extensive collections on National Socialism and the Third Reich to provide material to the United Nations War Crimes Commission and for bringing war criminals to justice.

In December 2011 the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide moved to 29 Russell Square, a revovated Georgian townhouse flanked by the Birkbeck College history department and the School of Orient and African Studies at the University of London.

In 1941 Argentine writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges published the short story La biblioteca de Babel (The Library of Babel) in his collection of stories entitled El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) in Buenos-Aires through the publishing house of Editorial Sur. 

In 1944 the entire 1941 book was included in his Ficciones (1944), through which it received much larger circulation. In 1962 two different English-language translations of The Library of Babel appeared: one by James E. Irby in a collection of Borges's works entitled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the Ficciones. A new translation by Andrew Hurley appeared in 1998 as part of a translation of the Collected Fictions. Hurley's translation of The Library of Babel was republished separately in 2000 by David R. Godine with reproductions of eleven etchings by Erik Desmazières illustrating Borges' text.

Borges' story of a universe in the form of a library, or an imaginary universal library, has been viewed as a fictional or philosophical predictor of characteristics and criticisms of the Internet.

"Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.

"Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the 'Crimson Hexagon', containing a book that contains the log of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God" (Wikipedia article on The Library of Babel, accessed 05-25-2009).

In the German bombing attack on Belgrade 4000 people were killed, and more than 8000 buildings were destroyed, including the National Library of Serbia. 

"This building was built in 1832 and was the only national library attacked on purpose and destroyed in WWII. The entire fund, of 350,000 books, including invaluable medieval manuscripts, was destroyed. The library also housed collections of Ottoman manuscripts, more than 200 old printed books dating from 15th to 17th centuries, old maps, engravings, works of arts and newspapers, including all the books printed in Serbia and neighbouring countries from 1832 on. The fate of Serbia, i.e. the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, had been decided upon with a putsch and protests of 27 March 1941 against the Trilateral Pact, signed by the then government two days before. The protests infuriated Hitler, who, on the same day, decided that, besides Greece, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia should also be destroyed as a state" (Radio Srbija: http://glassrbije.org/E/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10494&Itemid=32 , accessed 04-06-2010).

The Library of Congress published in 167 volumes reproductions of its printed card catalogue as A Catalog of Books Represented by Library of Congress Printed Cards, issued to July 31, 1942. (Ann Arbor: Edwards Bros., 1942-46).

In 1948 LC published a 42 volume supplement  and in 1953 a 23 volume supplement.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 163.

In 1944 American writer, poet, editor, inventor, genealogist, librarian and director of Wesleyan's Olin Memorial Library Fremont Rider published The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library.

In this unusually well designed and produced book for its time Rider detailed the increasing shortage of space in research libraries, and described how his invention of the microcard, an opaque microform, would help to solve this problem. He also claimed that American research libraries were doubling in size every sixteen years—an assertion later proved incorrect.

During the Warsaw Uprising the German army destroyed the Załuski Library, the first Polish public library, and the largest library in Poland. "Only 1800 manuscripts and 30,000 printed materials survived."

The Zaluski Library was built in Warsaw from 1747 to 1795 by bishops Józef Andrzej Załuski and his brother, Andrzej Stanisław Załuski. After the Kościuszko Uprising, the Russian troops acting on orders from Czarina Catherine II looted the library and dispatched them to St. Petersburg, where it became a nucleus of the Imperial Public Library, now the National Library of Russia.

"Parts of the collections were damaged or destroyed during the plunder of the library and the subsequent transport. According to the historian Joachim Lelewel, the Zaluskis' books, 'could be bought at Grodno by the basket'."

"The collection was subsequently dispersed among several Russian libraries. Some parts of the Zaluski collection came back to Poland on three separate dates: 1842, 1863.In the 1920s, in the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War and the Treaty of Riga the Soviet Union government returned around 50,000 items from the collection to Poland" (Wikipedia article on the Zaluski Library, accessed 12-02-2008).

With the onset of World War II, the most precious holdings of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek at Dresden were dispersed to eighteen castles and offices. As a result they largely survived the bombing raids of February and March 1945 on this major industrial center by the British and American Air Forces.

However, the raids destroyed the former library buildings and virtually the whole historic center of Dresden— with losses of about 200,000 volumes of twentieth-century manuscript and printed holdings. The losses included  irreplaceable musical manuscripts, including the major corpus of Tomasso Albinoni's unpublished music, though Georg Philipp Telemann's manuscripts were preserved. After the war, some 250,000 books from the library were taken to Russia.

Physician and medical librarian at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Sanford Larkey, published The Army Medical Library Research Project at the Welch Medical Library. This was one of the earliest projects in library automation and information retrieval. 

In November 1949 Ralph R. Shaw, Director of Libraries for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with Engineering Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, using funds provided by the Office of Technical Services of the Department of Commerce, developed the Rapid Selector machine for the electronic searching of information recorded in reels of microfilm.

Shaw's device incorporated technology developed by Emanuel Goldberg in 1928-1931, and by Vannevar Bush starting in 1938. Shaw's Rapid Selector was an attempt to realize goals described in Bush's 1945 publication, As We May Think. Shaw's machine

"was based on the earlier prototype developed from 1938 to 1940 by a team at MIT under Bush's direction. The project manager for the Bush prototype was John H. Howard and the research assistants were Russell C. Coile, John Coombs, Claude Shannon, and Lawrence Steinhardt. Eastman Kodak and National Cash Register each provided $10,000 funding. The project's objective was to develop, within two years, a prototype machine capable of selecting microfilmed business records from microfilm rapidly: A microfilm rapid selector. Bush's selector was indeed rapid because it took advantage of two new developments: Improved photoelectric cell technology; and the stroboscopic lamp pioneered by his colleague Harold E. Edgerton. By creating a bright flash of light lasting only one-millionth of a second, the stroboscopic lamp made it possible to copy a selected microfilm image "on the fly," without stopping the film (and the search) to make a copy. The Bush microfilm selector was never used operationally, except that it seems to have been used for cryptanalysis: It was, after all, designed to be effective at identifying (selecting) every occurrence of a specified code" (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html, accessed 02-20-2012).

in 1951 Shaw, Louis N. Ridenour, and Albert G. Hill published a thin volume entitled Bibliography in an Age of Science. That work described the Rapid Selector which had been built under Shaw's supervision, asserting that it did operate.  This work I came across several years after publishing Origins of Cyberspace and From Gutenberg to the Internet. However, finding further information about Shaw's Rapid Selector in use eluded me for several more years, and I wondered whether it really operated like Shaw claimed. In December 2011 I acquired a copy of Roberto Busa's Varia specimina condordantiarum (Milano, 1951). This bi-lingual work with texts in English and Italian was subtitled, "A First Example of Word Index Automatically Compiled and Printed by IBM Punched Card Machines." Before deciding to employ IBM electric punched card tabulators to produce his concordance Father Busa took the opportunity to see the Rapid Selector in operation at the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. He wrote that he was able to see it operating in November 1949, and that:

"Its principal feature is the whirlwiind speed with which it explores the reels of microfilm— 10,000 photograms per minute— and instantaneously rephotographs on another microfilm strip all and only those photograms which bear a determined item.

"I shall not give a detailed description because I thought not suitable to apply this system to the composition of concordances; I will only say that, besides not allowing automatic printing of the concordances, such as can be done with the system hereunder, the rapid selector necessitates on the one hand that all the cards, to be made from the sorted microfilm, be of photosensitive paper, and on the other hand all the different words and forms of each word be previously coded, for the entire text must be translated into numerical symbols by hand" (Busa, op cit, 22.)

The Library of Congress announced plans to compile the Union List of Serials using electric punched card tabulating.

Louis N. Ridenour, Ralph R. Shaw, and Albert G. Hill published a thin volume entitled Bibliography in an Age of Science. This book included three lectures delivered at the University of Illinois the previous year. Though it was preceded by journal articles and technical reports, this may be the first separately published book to address the problems of applying new technologies to the searching and storage of printed information in libraries.

Shaw's article included illustrations on pp. 60-61 of the Rapid Selector prototype which was in operation at this time. This machine, which applied the ideas of Emanuel Goldberg and the Memex idea of Vannevar Bush, stored 72,000 frames of information on a 2,000 foot reel of film. The prototype could search through the data at the rate of 78,000 "codes per minute." "Improvement of this searching speed to 120,000 codes per minute is now in sight."

At a meeting of the Medical Library Association Physician and librarian Sanford Larkey reported on advances in the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project.

This project was probably the earliest effort to apply computer methods, including punched card tabulating, in library cataloguing and information retrieval.

Mortimer Taube proposed the Uniterm Indexing system.

Taube developed Coordinate Indexing. This he defined as “the analysis of any field of information into a set of terms and the combination of these terms in any order to achieve any desired degree of detail in either indexing or selection."

"Coordinate Indexing used 'uniterms' to make storing and retrieving information easier and faster. Uniterms 'constitute a special set of rules and requirements which makes both the analysis into terms and the combination of the terms in order to specify items of information a remarkably simple and efficient process.' Taube had split coordinate indexing into two categories, item and term indexing. It used punch cards and a machine reader to search for specific items or documents by terms or keywords. Documentation, Inc. also brought forth the IBM 9900 Special Index Analyzer, also known as COMAC. COMAC stood for 'continuous multiple access controller.' This machine handled data punch cards, used for information storage and retrieval. It made 'logical relationships among terms' " (Wikipedia article on Mortimer Taube, accessed 03-02-2012).

Having written the entire book on a pay typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library, Ray Bradbury published the dystopian science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, named after the temperature at which books are supposed to combust spontaneously. Besides the regular trade edition, the publisher Ballantine Books, issued a limited edition of 200 copies signed by Bradbury and bound in white boards made of "Johns-Manville Quinterra," a fire-proof asbestos material.

"The novel presents a future American society in which the masses are hedonistic, and critical thought through reading is outlawed. The central character, Guy Montag, is employed is a 'fireman' (which, in this future, means 'book burner'). The number '451' refers to the temperature (in Fahrenheit) at which the books burn when the 'Firemen' burn them 'For the good of humanity'. Written in the early years of the Cold War, the novel is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society.

Bradbury's original intention in writing Fahrenheit 451 was to show his great love for books and libraries. "He has often referred to Montag as an allusion to himself" (Wikipedia article on Fahrenheit 451).

♦ François Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard wrote a screenplay based on the novel, and Truffault directed a film, released in 1966, entitled Fahrenheit 451, starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner. The film was re-issued on DVD by Universal Studios in 2003.

♦ After publically opposing ebooks for several years, telling The New York Times in 2009 that "that the Internet is a big distraction," in November 2011, at the age of 91, Bradbury authorized an ebook edition of Fahrenheit 451, and several other of his best-selling books. By this date Fahrenheit 451 had sold more than 10 million copies in print, and had been translated into many languages. However, also by this date ebooks comprised 20% of the fiction book market in the U.S. 

Harley Tillet built the perhaps the first operating library information retrieval system on a general purpose computer (IBM 701) at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) at Inyokern, California, later called China Lake.

"Searching started with a file of about 15,000 bibliographic records, indexed only by the Uniterms, and search output was limited to report accession numbers. The task was made even more difficult by the fact that the IBM 701, a scientific calculator, did not have any built-in character representation" (Bourne).

Probably the first widely used controlled vocabulary for searching information was the Subject Heading Authority List issued by the National Library of Medicine.

"The first official list of subject headings published by the National Library of Medicine appeared in 1954 under the title Subject Heading Authority List. It was based on the internal authority list that had been used for publication of Current List of Medical Literature which in turn had incorporated headings from the Library's Index-Catalogue and from the 1940 Quarterly Cumulative Index Medicus Subject Headings. With the inception of Index Medicus in 1960, a new and thoroughly revised Medical Subject Headings [MeSH] appeared.

"With the 1954 Subject Heading Authority List, there appeared a 'Categorical Listing' of standard subheadings. 'Abnormalities,' for instance, was listed as a standard subheading for use with terms for organs, tissues, and regions, and 'anesthesia and analgesia' was to be used under surgical procedure headings. But such subheadings could be used only for subject headings which fell within the category of headings to which they were to be applied. There were over 100 such subheadings, some of which varied only slightly according to the category of main heading with which they were used. For instance, 'therapeutic use' was used under physical agents and drugs and chemicals, and 'therapy' was used with diseases. In the 1960 Medical Subject Headings, the number of subheadings was reduced to sixty-seven. They could be used under any kind of main heading if the combination was not patently foolish or impossible. These sixty-seven subheadings were applied with more generalized meanings. For instance, the subheading "therapy" was used to mean 'therapy of,' 'therapeutic use of' or just 'therapeutic aspects.' Though this solution was simpler, many problems still remained. The use of one subheading might prevent the use of another. For instance, if a paper covered the etiology, pathology, and therapy of a disease, it might occur without further subdivision, or it might occur under the subheading which seemed most appropriate to the indexer. If 'therapy' was chosen, the article would be lost to the searcher looking for the etiology of the disease under the subheading 'etiology.' In addition, if the subheading 'diseases' had been appended to the term for an anatomic part, it would not be possible to subdivide further for the therapy or complications of such diseases. A related problem was the overlap in meaning of the subheadings themselves. It was difficult, for example, to decide whether a paper on chemical biosynthesis fit best under 'chemistry' or 'metabolism.'

"Categorized lists of terms were printed for the first time in the 1963 Medical Subject Headings and contained thirteen main categories and a total of fifty-eight separate groups in subcategories and main categories. These categorized lists made it possible for the user to find many more related terms than were in the former cross-reference structure. In 1963, the second edition of Medical Subject Headings contained 5,700 descriptors, compared with 4,400 in the 1960 edition. Of the headings used in the 1960 list, 113 were withdrawn in favor of newer terms. In contrast, the 2009 edition of MeSH contains 25,186 descriptors.

"In 1960, medical librarianship was on the cusp of a revolution. The first issue of the new Index Medicus series was published. On the horizon was a computerization project undertaken by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to store and retrieve information. The Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) would speed the publication process for bibliographies such as Index Medicus, facilitate the expansion of coverage of the literature, and permit searches for individuals upon demand. The new list of subject headings introduced in 1960 was the underpinning of the analysis and retrieval operation. MeSH was a new and thoroughly revised version of lists of subject headings compiled by NLM for its bibliographies and cataloging. Frank B. Rogers, then NLM director, announced several innovations as he introduced MeSH in 1960" (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/2009/introduction/intro_preface.html#pref_hist. accessed 05-04-2009).

On the completion of the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project, five authors, including Eugene Garfield, issued  the Final Report on Machine Methods for Information Searching.

Eugene Garfield published "Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas," Science, Vol. 122, No. 3159, 108-11. This paper may be the foundation of "bibliometrics" or citation analysis.

"Eugene Garfield . . . was deeply involved in the research relating to machine generated indexes in the mid-1950's and early 1960's. One of his earliest points of involvement was a project sponsored by the Armed Forces Medical Library (predecessor to our current National Library of Medicine). The Welch Medical Library Indexing project, as it was called, was to investigate the role of automation in the organization and retrieval of medical literature. The hope was that the problems associated with subjective human judgement in selection of descriptors and indexing terms could be eliminated. By removing the human element, one might thereby increase the speed with which information was incorporated in to the indexes. It might also increase the cost-effectiveness of the indexes. Garfield grasped early on that review articles in the journal literature were heavily reliant on the bibliographic citations that referred the reader to the original published source for the notable idea or concept. By capturing those citations, Garfield believed, the researcher could immediately get a view of the approach taken by another scientist to support an idea or methodology based on the sources that the published writer had consulted and cited as pertinent in the bibliography. As retrieval terms, citations could function as well as keywords and descriptors that were thoughtfully assigned by a professional indexer."

Storm Center, an American drama film directed by screenwriter Daniel Taradash, from a screenplay by Taradash and Elick Moll, and starring Bette Davis as the librarian, Alicia Hull, was first overtly anti-McCarthyism film to be produced in Hollywood during the height of the "Second Red Scare" (late 1940s through late 1950s).  During the Second Red Scare hundreds of Hollywood entertainment professionals lost their jobs as a result of the unofficial Hollywood blacklist, and thousands of people in other occupations also lost jobs.

"Alicia Hull is a widowed small town librarian dedicated to introducing children to the joy of reading. In exchange for fulfilling her request for a children's wing, the city council asks her to withdraw the book The Communist Dream from the library's collection. When she refuses to comply with their demand, she is fired and branded as a subversive. Judge Ellerbe feels she has been treated unfairly and calls a town meeting. Ambitious attorney and aspiring politician Paul Duncan, who is dating assistant librarian Martha Lockeridge, uses the meeting as an opportunity to make a name for himself by denouncing Alicia as a Communist. His forceful rhetoric turns the entire town, with the exception of young Freddie Slater, against her. The boy, increasingly upset by the mistreatment his mentor is suffering and affected by the influence of his narrow-minded father, finally turns on her himself and sets the library on fire. His action causes the residents to have a change of heart, and they ask Alicia to return and supervise the construction of a new building" (Wikipedia article on Storm Center, accessed 05-30-2009).

Raven, "Introduction: The Resonances of Loss," (Raven [ed.] Lost Libraries. The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity [2004] 31).

Hans Peter Luhn of IBM published "A Statistical Approach to Mechanized Encoding of Library Information," IBM Journal of Research and Development I (1957) no. 4, 309-317, issued by the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.

"ABSTRACT

"Written communication of ideas is carried out on the basis of statistical probability in that a writer chooses that level of subject specificity and that combination of words which he feels will convey the most meaning. Since this process varies among individuals and since similar ideas are therefore relayed at different levels of specificity and by means of different words, the problem of literature searching by machines still presents major difficulties. A statistical approach to this problem will be outlined and the various steps of a system based on this approach will be described. Steps include the statistical analysis of a collection of documents in a field of interest, the establishment of a set of “notions” and the vocabulary by which they are expressed, the compilation of a thesaurus-type dictionary and index, the automatic encoding of documents by machine with the aid of such a dictionary, the encoding of topological notations (such as branched structures), the recording of the coded information, the establishment of a searching pattern for finding pertinent information, and the programming of appropriate machines to carry out a search."

The romantic comedy film, Desk Set, was the first film to dramatize and satirize the role of automation in eliminating traditional jobs.

The name of the computer in the film, EMERAC, and its room-size installation, was an obvious take-off on UNIVAC, the best-known computer at the time. In the film, the computer was brought-in to replace the library of books, and its staff—an early foreshadowing of the physical information versus digital information issue.  Directed by Walter Lang and starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Gig Young, Joan Blondell, and Dina Merrill, the screenplay was written by Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron from the play by William Marchant.

The film "takes place at the "Federal Broadcasting Network" (exterior shots are of Rockefeller Center, in New York City, headquarters of NBC). Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) is in charge of its reference library, which is responsible for researching and answering questions on all manner of topics, such as the names of Santa's reindeer. She has been involved for seven years with network executive Mike Cutler (Gig Young), with no marriage in sight.

"The network is negotiating a merger with another company, but is keeping it secret. To help the employees cope with the extra work that will result, the network head has ordered two computers (called "electronic brains" in the film). Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), the inventor of EMERAC and an efficiency expert, is brought in to see how the library functions, to figure out how to ease the transition. Though extremely bright, as he gets to know Bunny, he is surprised to discover that she is every bit his match.

"When they find out the computers are coming, the employees jump to the conclusion the machines are going to replace them. Their fears seem to be confirmed when everyone on the staff receives a pink slip printed out by the new payroll computer. Fortunately, it turns out to be a mistake; the machine fired everybody in the company, including the president" Wikipedia article on Desk Set, accessed 12-23-2008).

In 1958 Hans Peter Luhn of IBM developed an automatic document indexing program for the production of literature abstracts.

"The complete text of an article in machine-readable form is scanned by an IBM 704 data-processing machine and analyzed in accordance with a standard program. Statistical information derived from word frequency and distribution is used by the machine to compute a relative measure of significance, first for individual words and then for sentences. Sentences scoring highest in significance are extracted and printed out to become the "auto-abstract."

The British Museum (now the British Library) published its General Catalogue of Printed Books. Photolithographic Edition to 1955 in 263 folio volumes from 1959 to 1966. These volumes reproduced the catalogue cards of 4,350,000 items.

In 1971 and 1972 the BM issued a Ten-Year Supplement, 1956-1970 in 23 volumes. This set of nearly 300 folio volumes was the "most voluminous" printed catalogue of a single library ever published in print.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 109.

Inforonics, founded in 1962 by MIT graduate Larry Buckland in Littleton, Massachusetts, developed and maintained "one of the first data publishing and retrieval systems used by organizations such as the U.S. Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library."

Eugene Garfield and the Institute for Scientific Information published the first Science Citation Index in five printed volumes, indexing 613 journals and 1.4 million citations, using the method of citation analysis.

Two years later Science Citation Index became available on magnetic tape.

Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) was operational at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.

MEDLARS was the first large scale, computer-based, retrospective search service available to the general public.

J.C.R. Licklider, Director of Project MAC (Machine-Aided Cognition and Multiple-Access Computers) at MIT and Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, published Libraries of the Future, a study of what libraries might be at the end of the twentieth century. Licklider's book reviewed systems for information storage, organization, and retrieval, use of computers in libraries, and library question-answering systems. In his discussion he was probably the first to raise general questions concerning the transition of the book from exclusively printing on paper to electronic form.

Programmer and systems analyst Henriette Avram completed the Library of Congress MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) Pilot Project, creating the foundation for the national and international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries.

The MARC standards consist of the MARC formats, which are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form, and related documentation. . . . Its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogs.

American historian and archivist Theodore R. Schellenberg published The Management of Archives.

Only July 5, 1967  three university presidents, three university vice- presidents, and four university library directors from the Ohio College Association met at Ohio State University in Columbus to found the non-profit Ohio College Library Center (OCLC). 

"The group hired Frederick G. Kilgour to build a ‘cooperative, computerized network in which most, if not all, Ohio libraries would participate.’ Fred’s idea was to merge the newest information storage and retrieval system, the computer, with the oldest, the library. His vision was that this new computerized library would be active rather than passive, that people would no longer go to the library, but that the library would go to the people. Back in 1967, this was a rather revolutionary idea.

"The first step in this vision would be to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database. The network and database would streamline operations and control rising costs. It also would bring libraries together to work cooperatively to keep track of the world’s information for the benefit of researchers and scholars" (http://www.oclc.org/about/history/beginning.htm, accessed 03-07-2012).

After the bibliographical database expanded far beyond the state of Ohio it was renamed Online Computer Library Center, retaining the same initials.

Mansell, in London, began publication of The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: a Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by other American Libraries. One of the largest sets of printed volumes ever published, and most probably the largest printed bibliography, it was completed in 1981 in 754 folio volumes, containing a total of over 12,000,000 entries on 528,000 pages, and occupying approximately 130 feet of shelf space. It was produced manually by photocopying library catalogue cards.

NUC was superceded around 1995 by bibliographical databases such as OCLC WorldCat on the Internet.

Michael S. Hart sent the digitized text of the American Declaration of Independence to everyone on a computer network at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This was the beginning of Project Gutenberg—the first digital library. Michael Hart has also been called the inventor of the ebook (e-book):

"Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea for eBooks. He had been granted access to significant computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to be Hart's life's work, spanning over 40 years" (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Michael_S._Hart, accessed 01-06-2012).

On August 26, 1971 Alden Library at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio became the first library to do online cataloging, using the OCLC system on a mainframe at Ohio State University in Columbus. That first day Alden Library catalogued 133 books online. 

The first year Ohio University used the OCLC shared cataloging system the university increased the number of books it catalogued by 33% while reducing its staff by 17 positions through attrition.

Medline (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online), a literature database of life sciences and biomedical information, was operational at the National Library of Medicine. It was initially a database production of the printed Index Medicus.

By 2008 Medline  ontained "more than 18 million" records from approximately 5,000 selected publications covering biomedicine and health from 1950 to the present.

The British Library Act of 1972 separated The British Library from the British Museum.

Marianne McDonald, a graduate student in classics at the University of California, San Diego, proposed and initially funded the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a digital library of Greek literature. Within 30 years the project was fully realized:

"The TLG® Digital Library now contains virtually all Greek texts surviving from the period between Homer (8th century B.C.) and A.D. 600 and the majority of surviving works up the fall of Byzantium in A.D. 1453. The center continues its efforts to include all extant Greek texts from the byzantine and post-byzantine period. TLG® texts have been disseminated in CD ROM format since 1985 and are now available online."

The New York Public Library and Columbia, Harvard, and Yale universities founded RLG  (Research Libraries Group), based in Mountain View, California. The New York Times called this "a sweeping and controversial program of combined operations."

At a London conference jointly sponsored by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the British Library planning began for the "Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue." The aim of the original project was to create a machine-readable union catalogue of books, pamphlets and other ephemeral material printed in English-speaking countries from 1701 to 1800.

"An ESTC team was established at the British Library in 1977, under the direction of Robin Alston, and began work on the Library's extensive holdings of in-scope material. By 1978, when Robin Alston and Mervyn Jannetta published Bibliography, Machine-Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC, there were already more than fifty contributors to the file including Göttingen State & University Library (Germany). In 1978, Henry Snyder was appointed to direct the ESTC project in North America. An American cataloguing team was established in 1979, and the North American Imprints Project (NAIP) began at the American Antiquarian Society in 1980. The International Committee of the ESTC (IESTC) was established in 1980, with a membership drawn from the UK and the USA, chaired by the British Library. The ESTC file was soon available online, from 1980 via the British Library BLAISE system and from 1981 in the US Research Libraries Group RLIN system. The file was published on microfiche in 1983, and the first CD-ROM edition appeared in 1996.

"In 1987, with the agreement of the Bibliographical Society and the Modern Language Association of America, the International Committee approved the extension of the database to cover the period from the beginning of printing in the British Isles (ca. 1472) to 1700. The file changed its name to the 'English Short Title Catalogue', thereby keeping its well-known acronym. The USA team began cataloguing pre-1701 material in 1989, joined in the mid-1990s by the British Library team, and the resulting records were made available in the RLIN file from 1994. These records were also included in the CD-ROM 2nd edition (1998) and 3rd edition (2003).

"In 1992, IESTC approved a further extension of the file to include serial publications. The USA team began work in 1994 on the cataloguing of serials within the scope of ESTC."

In October 1978 The British Library published Bibliography, Machine Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC. A Summary History of the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue: Working Metthods, Cataloguing Rules, A Catalogue of the Works of Alexander Pope Printed between 1711 and 1800 in the British Library by R. C. Alston & M. J. Jannetta. My copy of this work is cloth-bound and limited to 20 copies with a printed list of the recipients bound iin.

During restoration work, the monks of St. Catherine's monastery at Mount Sinai discovered a room under the St. George chapel which contained many parchment fragments. Among these fragments were thirteen missing pages from the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus.

In 1980 Mead Data Central of Miamisburg, Ohio, introduced the NEXIS service, providing online texts of various print publications.

Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist Umberto Eco published Il nome della rosa.  The English translation by William Weaver appeared in 1983 under the tile of The Name of the Rose. It is an intellectual murder mystery, combining semiotics, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, set in an Italian monastery patterned after the abbey and library at Bobbio, Italy, in 1327. Just a few of the appealing aspects of the plot, without a "spoiler," include an unknown treatise by Aristotle, On Laughter, a mysterious labyrinthine library, a medieval monk detective patterned after Sherlock Holmes, narration by a "sidekick" patterned after Dr. Watson, and many other features of interest to readers of this database. The title of the novel alludes to the literary tradition of Le Roman de la Rose.

This novel clearly attracted numerous contributors to the Wikipedia, and their articles both on Eco and The Name of the Rose provide such detailed and insightful analysis that it would be pointless to summarize. Instead I recommend that you follow the links for further information, and read the book if it suits your taste.

In 1983 Eco published an informative small illustrated book explaining aspects of the novel entitled Positille a Il nome della rosa. This was also translated into English by William Weaver as Postscript to the Name of the Rose, and published in 1984. I found reading Eco's Postscript very worthwhile.

In cooperation with the Library of Congress, The National Endowment for the Humanities began funding the United States Newspaper Program— "a cooperative national effort among the states and the federal government to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present."

The Perseus Digital Library Project began at Tufts University, Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts. Though the project was ostensibly about Greek and Roman literature and culture, it evolved into an exploration of the ways that digital collections could enhance scholarship with new research tools that took libraries and scholarship beyond the physical book.

"Since planning began in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. Two decades later, as new forms of publication emerge and millions of books become digital, this question is more pressing than ever. Perseus is a practical experiment in which we explore possibilities and challenges of digital collections in a networked world.

"Our flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. We are applying what we have learned from Classics to other subjects within the humanities and beyond. We have studied many problems over the past two decades, but our current research centers on personalization: organizing what you see to meet your needs.

"We collect texts, images, datasets and other primary materials. We assemble and carefully structure encyclopedias, maps, grammars, dictionaries and other reference works. At present, 1.1 million manually created and 30 million automatically generated links connect the 100 million words and 75,000 images in the core Perseus collections. 850,000 reference articles provide background on 450,000 people, places, organizations, dictionary definitions, grammatical functions and other topics."

In 1985 an IBM team began scanning the papers related to Columbus' discovery of the new world at El Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla (AGI), Seville, Spain.

"To coincide with the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landfall in the West Indies, the AGI project was to capture 10% of the collection estimated to consist of 86,000,000 pages. By 1992, it had indeed collected about 9,000,000 digital image pages onto optical disks, together with a set of finding aids." This was among the earliest practical digital libraries.

The Name of the Rose, a German-French-Italian film made in English based on the novel by Umberto Eco, was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, and starred Sean Connery and Christian Slater. Exterior sets were built outside of Rome; most interior scenes were filmed in Eberbach Abbey, Eltville am Rhein, Germany. Production was by Constantin Film, Frankfurt, Germany.

Though the film enjoyed good sales in Europe, it was a financial flop in the U.S where interest in medieval culture is highly limited. In my opinion this film is an excellent adaptation of the novel even though the inevitable simplication of the story line was necessary. It may be the best book history and library film set in the Middle Ages. It was later issued on DVD and Blu-ray with a fascinating commentary by the director.

American filmaker Terry Sanders and the American Film Foundation, and the Council on Library and Information Resources, issued Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record. a film narrated by Robert McNeil.

"The unforgettable story of the deterioration and destruction of our world’s intellectual heritage and the global crisis in preserving library materials. . . .

"Millions of pages of paper in books, photographs, drawings and maps are disintegrating and turning to dust. This remarkable film provides a comprehensive assessment of the worldwide situation, demonstrates methods of restoration and preservation and suggests ways to prevent new documents from facing ultimate destruction" (from the American Film Foundation blurb; on July 28, 2009 it was available on DVD from the foundation in 33 and 58 minute versions).

OCLC, Dublin, Ohio, acquired Forest Press, publisher of the Dewey Decimal Classification system.

On February 14, 1988 fire broke out in the newspaper room on the third floor of the Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad.

"By the time it was extinguished the following afternoon, it had destroyed 400,000 books of the 12 million housed in the building; two to three million more were damaged by heat and smoke; and over one million were damp or wet from the firemen's hoses. The extent of the damage made it the worst library fire in history. (The Los Angeles Public Library fire by comparison, also destroyed 400,000 books, but damaged only a half million by heat and smoke.)

"Many of the lost volumes were part of the Baer Collection of foreign scientific works: an early estimate gives 300,000, a later one 190,000, as the number lost. The rest were Russian books, many of then early scientific and medical books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries." (The Abbey Newsletter Volume XII, number 2 [1988].)

Recognizing the importance of computerized information processing methods for the conduct of biomedical research, Senator and Representative Claude Pepper sponsored legislation that established the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) as a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), Bethesda, Maryland. NLM was chosen for its experience in creating and maintaining biomedical databases, and because as part of NIH, it could establish an intramural research program in computational molecular biology. 

The Library of Congress began making its collections available in digital form through the American Memory project. Initially the files for American Memory were distributed to 44 schools and libraries on CD-ROMS.

American computer engineers Brewster Kahle and Harry Morris, both of Thinking Machines, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in collaboration with Apple Computer, Dow Jones, and KPMG Peat Marwick, developed the Wide Area Information Server or WAIS system. WAIS was a client-server text searching system that used the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications to search index databases on remote computers.

"Public WAIS was often used as a full text search engine for individual Internet Gopher servers, supplementing the popular Veronica system which only searched the menu titles of Gopher sites. WAIS and Gopher share the World Wide Web's client–server architecture and a certain amount of its functionality. The WAIS protocol is influenced largely by the z39.50 protocol designed for networking library catalogs. It allows a text-based search, and retrieval following a search. Gopher provides a free text search mechanism, but principally uses menus. A menu is a list of titles, from which the user may pick one. While gopher space is a web containing many loops, the menu system gives the user the impression of a tree.

"The W3 data model is similar to the gopher model, except that menus are generalized to hypertext documents. In both cases, simple file servers generate the menus or hypertext directly from the file structure of a server. The W3 hypertext model gives the program more power to communicate the options available to the reader, as it can include headings and various forms of list structure" (Wikipedia article on Wide Area Information Server, accessed 01-06-2012).

The School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill  founded an archive and information sharing environment designed to be "contributor-driven and content-managed." Originally one of the SunSITES, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, it was a pioneering collaboration of electronic librarianship, journalism and telecommunication.

"After living under the name MetaLab for a period of time, the environment is now known as ibiblio. It has grown to host one of the Internet's most active and respected software archives, coexisting with music archives, large text database projects, and special exhibits. The diverse management and content models of ibiblio complement and inform each other to give users the most useful and relevant information about a variety of topics. Examples include: single content manager archives ranging from folk music to travelogues, academic and librarian-managed archives, historical enthusiast-managed archives such as the Pearl Harbor archives, author-managed archives involving over 100 active authors with special interests such as the Linux Documentation Project.

"Through these different types of archive models, the resources available on ibiblio range from free applications and operating systems software to graphics and art, from fiction, poetry, literature, and music to religion, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio also offers streaming audio and video. ibiblio currently averages about 1.5 million information requests a day." (ibiblio, accessed 03-19-2009).

UNESCO, Paris, France, launched the Memory of the World Programme, an international initiative to guard against collective amnesia, by aiming at preservation and dissemination of valuable archive holdings and library collections worldwide.

OCLC, Dublin, Ohio, published Electronic Dewey, the first library classification system published in electronic form.

At the Towards Federation 2001 (TF2001) meeting a group from the Australian library and archives sectors was organized to develop appropriate guidelines for the preservation of information in electronic form. This evolved into the National Library of Australia's Preserving Access to Digital Information Initiative (PADI).

Fred Mintzer and colleagues at IBM photographed and developed a database of about 20,000 digital images for the Vatican Library. This was the first library of digital images on the Internet.

Edward A. Fox of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) issued Sourcebook on Digital Libraries. Version 1.0. The earliest reference in the bibliography is the April 1991 issue of Byte magazine. Most other references are to works published in 1992.

At Xerox PARC Vicky Reich and Mark Weiser described proposed electronic features of the "national information infrastructure" in a paper entitled Libraries are More than Information: Situational Aspects of Electronic Libraries. All references cited in this paper are to printed publications.

The National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative made its first six awards. One of these was The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project:

"This project . . . is to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal' library, proving uniform access to the large number of emerging networked information sources and collections. These include both on-line versions of pre-existing works and new works and media of all kinds that will be available on the globally interlinked computer networks of the future. The Integrated Digital Library is broadly defined to include everything from personal information collections, to the collections that one finds today in conventional libraries, to the large data collections shared by scientists. The technology developed in this project will provide the "glue" that will make this worldwide collection usable as a unified entity, in a scalable and economically viable fashion."

"A one-day, constrained-size workshop addendum to the annual CAIA conference" was held in San Antonio, Texas, on the emerging topic of digital libraries. It issued the report: Digital Library: Gross Structure and Requirements.

The Directors of 15 major academic libraries in the United States, and the President of the Commission on Preservation and Access, and the Council on Library and Information Resources founded The Digital Library Federation for:

"The implementation of a distributed, open digital library conforming to the overall theme and accessible across the global Internet. This library shall consist of collections--expanding over time in number and scope -- to be created from the conversion to digital form of documents contained in our and other libraries and archives, and from the incorporation of holdings already in electronic form."

The first annual conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries met at College Station, Texas.

The Library of Congress announced The National Digital Library Program.

The Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group (RLG), Mountain View, California, created the Task Force on Digital Archiving. The purpose of the Task Force was to investigate the means of ensuring “continued access indefinitely into the future of records stored in digital electronic form.” On May 1, 1996 the group issued its report: Preserving Digital Information.

JSTOR (short for Journal Storage), an online system for archiving academic journals, was founded in 1995.  In 2012 it provided online searchable texts of more than 1000 academic journals to member educational institutions. 

"JSTOR was originally conceived as a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries, especially research and university libraries, due to the increasing number of academic journals in existence. The founder, William G. Bowen, was the president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988. Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and space to maintain a comprehensive collection of journals. By digitizing many journal titles, JSTOR allowed libraries to outsource the storage of these journals with the confidence that they would remain available for the long term. Online access and full-text search ability improved access dramatically. JSTOR originally encompassed ten economics and history journals and was initiated in 1995 at seven different library sites. As of November 2010, there were 6,425 participating libraries. JSTOR access was improved based on feedback from these sites and it became a fully searchable index accessible from any ordinary Web browser. Special software was put in place to make pictures and graphs clear and readable.

"With the success of this limited project, Bowen and Kevin Guthrie, then-president of JSTOR, were interested in expanding the number of participating journals. They met with representatives of the Royal Society of London, and an agreement was made to digitize the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society back to its beginning in 1665. The work of adding these volumes to JSTOR was completed by December 2000. As of November 2, 2010, the database contained 1,289 journal titles in 20 collections representing 53 disciplines, and 303,294 individual journal issues, totaling over 38 million pages of text (Wikipedia article on JSTOR, accessed 01-12-2012).

The Corporation for National Research Initiiatives, sponsored by DARPA, began publication, only on the web, of D-lib Magazine, the Magazine of the Digital Library Forum.

The National Library of Sweden (Kungl. Biblioteket) initiated the Kulturarw3 Project - The Royal Swedish Web Archiw3e.

In 1996 computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive in San Francisco.  After the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened in 2002 the Internet Archive established a mirror site at that historic location.

In 1996 LexisNexis online services, Miamisburg, Ohio, exceeded one billion documents.

The first ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries occurred in Bethesda, Maryland.

The IEEE Computer Society established the Technical Committee on Digital Libraries. "It is to promote research in the theory and practice of all aspects of Collective Memory, i.e. the fields of Digital Libraries, Digital Museums and Digital Archives of all kinds."

At a news conference in San Francisco the California Digital Library was founded "by University of California President Emeritus Richard Atkinson to build the University's digital library, assist campus libraries with sharing their resources and holdings more effectively, and provide leadership in applying technology to the development of library collections and services."

Michael Lesk attempted to calculate "How Much Information is There in the World?" He included information on how much information a human brain may be able to retain.

Incorporating scans begun in 1992, the Bibliothèque nationale de France launched the digital library Gallica, " la bibliothèque virtuelle de l'honnête homme."

On August 1, 2009 Gallica contained:

"Documents moissonnés

bibliothèques partenaires : 5,834

partenaires commerciaux : 12,133

Total : 17,967

Documents de la BnF

Imprimés

114,397 monographies, dont 59,651 consultables en mode texte

3,471 titres de périodiques, représentant 526,223 fascicules dont 213,122 en mode texte

Documents iconographiques : 38,493 lots, représentant approximativement 111,643 images"

Cartes et plans : 5,008 documents

Documents sonores : 1,056 documents

Documents manuscrits : 4,164 documents

Musique notées : 2,127 documents (http://gallica.bnf.fr/content?lang=en#stats).

RLG DigiNews, RLG's online newsletter for digital libraries and preservation, produced for the Research Libraries Group by the staff of the Department of Preservation and Conservation, Cornell University Library, began publication on the web.

Digital Scriptorium, an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, hosted by Columbia University Libraries, that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research, first appeared on the web.

The National Library of Australia, Canberra, initiated its Digital Services Project with the goal of establishing a web archive. This evolved into PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive.

American filmaker Terry Sanders, the American Film Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources,  and the American Council of Learned Societies issued Into the Future: On the Preservation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age.

This film, narratived by Robert McNeil, was a sequel to Slow Fires (1987). It "explores the hidden crisis of the digital information age. Will digitally stored information and knowledge survive into the future? Will humans twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now have access to the electronically recorded history of our time?" (from the American Film Foundation blurb; it was available in 33 and 58 minute versions on July 28, 2009). The film included interviews with Peter Norton and Tim Berners-Lee.

The Early English Books Online project, a joint effort between the University of Michigan, Oxford University and ProQuest Information and Learning, began to provide searchable texts of all 125,000 English books printed from 1475 to 1700. This was a development of a project that began in 1938 to microfilm all English books in the timeframe.

The LOCKSS digital library preservation program ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") began intensive testing at Stanford University. It was developed in order to allow libraries to retain copies of digital publications they purchased.

How much information?, a project at the University of California at Berkeley by Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, attempted to measure the amount of information produced in the world each year.

"Heavy information overload: the world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.”

“Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage.”

“Approximately 240 terabytes (compressed) of unique data are recorded on printed media worldwide each year.” The website provides a chart breaking down the printed media into categories.

The National Digital Library Program sponsored by the Library of Congress digitized and made available online over 5,000,000 items.

The Library of Congress initiated a prototype system called Minerva (Mapping the Internet the Electronic Resources Virtual Archive) to collect and preserve open-access Web resources.

The U.S. Congress appropriated $99,800,000 for the planning and implementation of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). It was a collaborative initiative of the Library of Congress.

The Internet Archive, founded in 1996 in San Francisco, made its data available through the Wayback Machine.

The Digital Preservation Coalition was established in Heslington, York, United Kingdom "to foster join action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base."

The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), Washington, D.C.,  issued Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).

"An OAIS is an archive, consisting of an organization of people and systems, that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a Designated Community. It meets a set of such responsibilities as defined in this document and this allows an OAIS archive to be distinguished from other uses of the term ‘archive’. The model provides a framework for the understanding and increased awareness of archival concepts needed for long-term digital information preservation and access, and for describing and comparing architectures and operations of existing and future archives. It also guides the identification and production of OAIS related standards." ISO Number : 1472

American writer Nicholson Baker, South Berwick, Maine, published Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.  An excerpt appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Yorker, under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past."

This exhaustively researched polemic detailed Baker's quest to expose the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and '90s.

"The term 'double fold' refers to the test used by many librarians and preservation administrators to determine the brittleness and 'usability' of paper. The test consists of folding down the corner of a page of a book or newspaper, then folding it back in the opposite direction—one double fold. The action is then repeated until the paper breaks or is about to break. The more folds the page can withstand, the more durable it is. (In the late 1960s, preservation founding father William Barrow was fond of using a machine-run fold tester to back up his claims about the number of endangered books.) This experiment was used by library officials to identify their institution's brittle books, and, in some case, to justify withdrawing items from the shelves or replacing them with another format (most often microfilm). Baker's take on the double-fold test? '...utter horseshit and craziness. A leaf of a book is a semi-pliant mechanism. It was made for non-acute curves, not for origami.' (p. 157)"

"In 1999, Baker took matters into his own hands and founded the American Newspaper Repository in order to save some of the collections being auctioned off by the British Library. A year later he became the owner of thousands of volumes of old newspapers, including various runs of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York World. In May 2004 the entire collection was moved to Duke University, where it is stored on climate-controlled shelves and looked after by the Rare Books and Special Collections division. As part of the gift agreement between the American Newspaper Repository and Duke, the collection will kept together in perpetuity, and no disbinding or experimental deacidification will be allowed.

"Baker makes four recommendations in Double Fold's epilogue: that libraries should be required to publish lists of discarded holdings on their websites, that the Library of Congress should fund a building that will serve as a storage repository for publications and documents not housed on-site, that some U.S. libraries should be designated with saving newspapers in bound form, and that both the U.S. Newspaper and the Brittle Books Programs should be abolished, unless they can promise that all conservation procedures will be non-destructive and that originals will be saved" (Wikipedia article on Double Fold, accessed 07-28-2009).

The Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, D.C., issued Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections by Stephen G. Nichols and Abby Smith. exploring the tension between physical and digital artifacts.

In spite of the immense loss of information over the centuries, there are about 45,000 Egyptian papyri, including fragments, in six institutional libraries and museums in the United States. (Athena Review, 2, no. 2). The main U.S. holders of papyri are Duke University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. It has been estimated that there are about 500,000 unpublished papyri preserved elsewhere. Other major institutional collections of papyri are the University of Heidelberg, University of Oxford, University of Lecce, and the University of Copenhagen.

RLG, Mountain View, California, and OCLC issued the report, Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities.

How much information 2003: The research project from the University of California at Berkeley, first published on the web in 2000, updated its findings. Strikingly it estimated that each person in the U.S. generated 800 MB of recorded information. This was more than three times the data that the same research project calculated was being produced in 2000. The remaining data in this frame of the timeline is quoted from the 2003 website:

"How much new information is created each year? Newly created information is stored in four physical media -- print, film, magnetic and optical --and seen or heard in four information flows through electronic channels -- telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. This study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information recorded in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows. Where reliable data was available we have compared the 2002 findings to those of our 2000 study (which used 1999 data) in order to describe a few trends in the growth rate of information.

1. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
   • How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.
   • Hard disks store most new information. Ninety-two percent of new information is stored on magnetic media, primarily hard disks. Film represents 7% of the total, paper 0.01%, and optical media 0.002%.
   • The United States produces about 40% of the world's new stored information, including 33% of the world's new printed information, 30% of the world's new film titles, 40% of the world's information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media.
   • How much new information per person? According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world population is 6.3 billion, thus almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper.
2. We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years.
   • Information explosion? We estimate that new stored information grew about 30% a year between 1999 and 2002.
   • Paperless society? The amount of information printed on paper is still increasing, but the vast majority of original information on paper is produced by individuals in office documents and postal mail, not in formally published titles such as books, newspapers and journals.
3. Information flows through electronic channels -- telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet -- contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls - including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.
   • Telephone calls worldwide � on both landlines and mobile phones � contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form; this represents 98% of the total of all information transmitted in electronic information flows, most of it person to person.
   • Most radio and TV broadcast content is not new information. About 70 million hours (3,500 terabytes) of the 320 million hours of radio broadcasting is original programming. TV worldwide produces about 31 million hours of original programming (70,000 terabytes) out of 123 million total hours of broadcasting.
   • The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections.
   • Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year.
   • Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.
   • P2P file exchange on the Internet is growing rapidly. Seven percent of users provide files for sharing, while 93% of P2P users only download files. The largest files exchanged are video files larger than 100 MB, but the most frequently exchanged files contain music (MP3 files).
   • How we use information. Published studies on media use say that the average American adult uses the telephone 16.17 hours a month, listens to radio 90 hours a month, and watches TV 131 hours a month. About 53% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, averaging 25 hours and 25 minutes a month at home, and 74 hours and 26 minutes a month at work � about 13% of the time."

Michael Day of UKOLN, University of Bath, published a comprehensive review of worldwide projects for preservation of web data: Collecting and Preserving the World Wide Web.

Lotfi Belkhir (formerly of the Venture Lab at Xerox) introduced the Kirtas BookScan 1200 produced by Kirtas Technologies, Victor, New York, at the AIIM Exhibition in New York City.

The BookScan 1200 was the first automatic, page-turning scanner for the conversion of bound volumes to digital files. The manufacturers claimed that it could scan volumes at up to 1200 pages per hour. The motto of the company was "Moving knowledge from Books to Bytes."

The International Internet Preservation Consortium  (IIPC,) netpreserve.org, was founded.

"In July 2003 the national libraries of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, The British Library (UK), The Library of Congress (USA) and the Internet Archive (USA) acknowledged the importance of international collaboration for preserving Internet content for future generations. This group of 12 institutions chartered the IIPC to fund and participate in projects and working groups to accomplish the Consortium’s goals. The initial agreement was in effect for three years, during which time the membership was limited to the charter institutions. Since then, membership has expanded to include additional libraries, archives, museums and cultural heritage institutions involved in Web archiving.

"The goals of the consortium are:

" * To enable the collection, preservation and long-term access of a rich body of Internet content from around the world.

" * To foster the development and use of common tools, techniques and standards for the creation of international archives.

" * To be a strong international advocate for initiatives and legislation that encourage the collection, preservation and access to Internet content.

" * To encourage and support libraries, archives, museums and cultural heritage institutions everywhere to address Internet content collecting and preservation."

On October 23, 2003 Amazon.com made it possible to “search inside” the full text of 120,000 books from more than 190 publishers.  This allowed Amazon users to search not only the full texts of individual titles but all 120,000 collectively. 

On October 23, 2003 joujrnalist Gary Wolf published an article about the cultural history of digital libraries, and more specifically Amazon's "Search Inside," in Wired magazine, entitled "The Great Library of Amazonia," from which I quote a portion:

"The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I've recently become interested in Boss Tweed, New York's most famous pillager of public money. Manber types "Boss Tweed" into his search engine. Out pop a few books with Boss Tweed in the title. But the more intriguing results come from deep within books I never would have thought to check: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole; American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis; Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill. I immediately recognize the power of the archive to make connections hitherto unseen. As the number of searchable books increases, it will become possible to trace the appearance of people and events in published literature and to follow the most digressive pathways of our collective intellectual life.

"From the Hamill reference, I link to a page in the afterward on which he cites books that influenced his portrait of Tweed. There, on the screen, is the cream of the research performed by a great metropolitan writer and editor. Some of the books Hamill recommends are out of print, but all are available either new or used on Amazon.

"With persistence, serendipity and plenty of time in a library, I may have found these titles myself. The Amazon archive is dizzying not because it unearths books that would necessarily have languished in obscurity, but because it renders their contents instantly visible in response to a search. It allows quick query revisions, backtracking, and exploration. It provides a new form of map.

"Getting to this point represents a significant technological feat. Most of the material in the archive comes from scanned pages of actual books. This may be surprising, given that most books today are written on PCs, e-mailed to publishers, typeset on computers, and printed on digital presses. But many publishers still do not have push-button access to the digital files of the books they put out. Insofar as the files exist, they are often scattered around the desktops of editors, designers, and contract printers. For books more than a few years old, complete digital files may be lost. John Wiley & Sons contributed 5,000 titles to the Amazon project -- all of them in physical form.

"Fortunately, mass scanning has grown increasingly feasible, with the cost dropping to as low as $1 each. Amazon sent some of the books to scanning centers in low-wage countries like India and the Philippines; others were run in the United States using specialty machines to ensure accurate color and to handle oversize volumes. Some books can be chopped out of their bindings and fed into scanners, others have to be babied by a human, who turns pages one by one. Remarkably, Amazon was already doing so much data processing in its regular business that the huge task of reading the images of the books and converting them into a plain-text database was handled by idle computers at one of the company's backup centers."

At the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Umberto Eco delivered a lecture entitled Vegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of Books.

I quote from the beginning of the lecture:

"WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts.

"However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper. Let me disregard the fact that at a certain moment the vellum of the first codices were of an organic origin, and the fact that the first paper was made with rugs and not with wood. Let me speak for the sake of simplicity of vegetal memory in order to designate books.  

"This place has been in the past and will be in the future devoted to the conservation of books; thus, it is and will be a temple of vegetal memory. Libraries, over the centuries, have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not know.

"If you will allow me to use such a metaphor, a library is the best possible imitation, by human beings, of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and understood at the same time. A person able to store in his or her mind the information provided by a great library would emulate in some way the mind of God. In other words, we have invented libraries because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we try to do our best to imitate them. To build, or better to rebuild, today one of the greatest libraries of the world might sound like a challenge, or a provocation. It happens frequently that in newspaper articles or academic papers some authors, facing the new computer and internet era, speak of the possible "death of books". However, if books are to disappear, as did the obelisks or the clay tablets of ancient civilisations, this would not be a good reason to abolish libraries. On the contrary, they should survive as museums conserving the finds of the past, in the same way as we conserve the Rosetta Stone in a museum because we are no longer accustomed to carving our documents on mineral surfaces.  

"Yet, my praise for libraries will be a little more optimistic. I belong to the people who still believe that printed books have a future and that all fears à propos of their disappearance are only the last example of other fears, or of milleniaristic terrors about the end of something, the world included. . . ."

In 2004 OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), Dublin, Ohio, served more than 50,540 libraries of all types in the U.S. and 84 countries and territories around the world. OCLC WorldCat contained 56 million catalogue records, representing 894 million holdings.

In 2004 the Library of Congress contained 130,000,000 physical items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. Its collections included more than 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 58 million manuscripts

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress founded the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

"Ultimately over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet. An accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information on the website will direct users to newspaper titles available in all types of formats."

The Index-Catalogue of the Surgeon-General's Office, a 61 volume bibliographical resource for the history of medicine and science, which began publication in 1870 under the direction of John Shaw Billings, was made available online by the United States National Library of Medicine.

This was the culmination of a data conversion project which began in 1996. Its untility as an online resource was immensely enhanced since it became a single searchable database rather than a series of physical volumes and different indices published over decades.

Archaeologists announced the finding what they believed to be the remains of the building site of the ancient Library of Alexandria.

The 13 lecture halls at the building site could have housed as many as 5000 students, raising the possibility that the Library of Alexandria might have been the world's first university.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair Google announced the Google Print project to scan and make searchable on the Internet the texts of more than ten million books from the collections of the New York Public Library, and the libraries of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford Universities.

The project was renamed Google Books in December 2005.

The Parker Library on the Web project, digitizing one of the greatest collections of medieval manuscripts formed in the sixteenth century by Archbishop Matthew Parker, began. It was:

"a multi-year undertaking of Corpus Christi College, the Stanford University Libraries and the Cambridge University Library, to produce a high-resolution digital copy of every imageable page in the 538 manuscripts described in M. R. James Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1912), and to build an interactive web application in which the manuscript page images can be used by scholars and students in the context of editions, translations and secondary sources" (Parker Library on the Web site, accessed 11-27-2008).

The project was expected to be completed in 2009. The website of the Parker Library is at this link.

On March 17, 2005 The European Library, a free service that offered access to the resources of the 48 national libraries of Europe in 20 languages, was launched from its headquarters at Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag (The Hague), Netherlands.  Resources included both digital or physical (books, posters, maps, sound recordings, videos, etc.).

"Currently The European Library gives access to 150 million entries across Europe. The amount of referenced digital collections is constantly increasing. Quality and reliability are guaranteed by the 48 collaborating national libraries of Europe. The European Library is a non-commercial organisation" (European Library website, accessed 11-21-2008).

At the Plenary Session of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO held at Georgetown University, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington offered a Proposal for a World Digital Library.

"The invention of the printing press with movable type fanned religious wars in the 16th century. The onset of telegraphy, photography, and the power-driven printing press in the 19th century created mass journalism that fulminated nationalistic passions and world wars in the 20th century. The arrival in the late 20th century of instantaneous, networked, global communication may well have facilitated the targeted propaganda, recruitment, and two-way communication of transnational terrorist organizations more than it has helped combat them.

"We are now discovering—painfully and much too slowly—that deep conflict between cultures is in many ways being fired up rather than cooled down by this revolution in communications, as was the case in the 16th and 19th centuries. Whenever new technology suddenly brings different peoples closer together and makes them aware of certain commonalities, it seems simultaneously to create a compensatory psychological need for the different peoples to define—and even assert aggressively—what is unique and distinctive about their own historic cultures."