From Sumerian clay tablets to Finnish borrowing records, libraries span 4,600 years
The earliest libraries held no books at all, only archives of cuneiform clay tablets from Sumer, some dating to around 2600 BC. The word itself traces to the Latin liber, meaning book. Today more than half of all Finns hold a library card, the highest share of registered borrowers anywhere.
English took library from Latin libraria, a book collection, and librarium, a box for books. Many other European languages instead borrowed the Greek bibliotheke, originally a book container, which gives French bibliotheque and German Bibliothek. Private collections of written books appeared in classical Greece during the 5th century BC, and by the 6th century AD the Mediterranean's greatest libraries were those of Constantinople and Alexandria.
Great collections flourished elsewhere too. The Fatimid dynasty, which ruled from 909 to 1171, kept a palace library that a historian of the time called a wonder of the world, probably the largest body of literature on earth then. Libraries were also targets: conquerors seeking to erase a people's memory burned them, as the Mongols did with the Nizari library at Alamut in 1256, whose worldwide fame the conqueror Juwayni boasted about. The libraries of Timbuktu, founded in the 14th century, drew scholars from far away. The oldest modern public library is usually taken to be the Zaluski Library, opened in Warsaw in 1732, which grew into Poland's national library.
For generations, finding a book meant consulting a card catalogue, cabinets of drawers packed with index cards that in large libraries could fill an entire room. Online catalogues now let users search from home, though retrieving a volume from sprawling buildings may still need maps, signs or radio tags. Some libraries keep closed stacks, where staff fetch items on request. In the 19th century, American public libraries began teaching patrons how to use their resources, a movement led partly by John Cotton Dana.
Borrowing habits have shifted. American public library users took out roughly 15 books each per year from 1856 to 1978, but book circulation per user then fell by about half by 2004. Growth in audiovisual lending, around a quarter of all loans by 2004, explains about half of that drop.
Source: Library
