Types of libraries

Library services available throughout the world vary so much in detail from country to country that it is difficult to present anything but the most general picture of their activities. Nevertheless, they follow a broad but discernible pattern that has evolved over the years.

National libraries

In most countries there is a national or state library or a group of libraries maintained by national resources, usually bearing responsibility for publishing a national bibliography and for maintaining a national bibliographical information centre. National libraries strive principally to collect and to preserve the nation’s literature, though they try to be as international in the range of their collections as possible.

Most national libraries receive, by legal right (known in English as legal, or copyright, deposit), one free copy of each book and periodical printed in the country. Certain other libraries throughout the world share this privilege, though many of them receive their legal deposit only by requesting it.

The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British Library in London, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., are among the most famous and most important national libraries in the Western world. Their importance springs from the quality, size, and range of their collections, which are comprehensive in scope, and from their attempts to maintain their comprehensiveness. They achieve the latter quality with diminishing success in view of the vastly increased number of publications that daily appear throughout the world, the failure of publishers to provide legal-deposit copies, and the difficulty of ensuring adequate representation of publications issued in the developing countries.

Bibliothèque Nationale

As indicated above, the Bibliothèque Nationale before the French Revolution was known as the Bibliothèque du Roi and owes its origin to Charles V. During the 15th and 16th centuries it received a number of important collections of manuscripts; in 1617, under the librarianship of de Thou, its right to legal deposit was reaffirmed and continued to be rigidly enforced. In the first quarter of the 18th century, four of the library’s departments (of prints, coins, printed books, and manuscripts) were created; it was opened to the public in 1735. Enormous additions accrued to the library as a result of the Revolution and the confiscation of aristocratic and church private collections. The catalog of the library on cards was completed under the librarianship (1874–1905) of Léopold Delisle, and in 1897 he made a start to the task of compiling a printed catalog in volume form.

The present-day Bibliothèque Nationale plays a leading role in the French national library service. Its Directorate of Libraries oversees all public libraries and participates in the training of library professionals.

The British Library

For more than two centuries the British Museum combined a great museum of antiquities with a great comprehensive library. The library was founded in 1753 by the acceptance of the bequest of the collections of Sir Hans Sloane, physician to King George II and president of the Royal Society. The library was built up on the basis of two other important collections, that of Sir Robert Cotton and that of Edward and Robert Harley, earls of Oxford; to these were added the Royal Library, given by George II in 1757. With this collection came also the right to legal deposit of one copy of every book published in the British Isles; this right is generally enforced, yet many titles arrive only slowly and some not at all. These four basic collections were notably enlarged during the first century of the library’s history by the addition of many private collections, including the libraries of King George III (1823) and of Thomas Grenville (1846). The library’s printed catalog, executed under the guidance of Sir Anthony Panizzi, was issued between 1881 and 1905.

The British Museum’s library was separated from the museum under the British Library Act of 1972 and by July 1, 1973, was reorganized as the British Library Reference Division. The British Library Lending Division was formed from the amalgamation of two previously existing libraries: the National Central Library, which had been the centre for interlibrary lending since 1927 and which had a collection of some 400,000 books and periodicals, mainly in the humanities and social sciences; and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology, which had been opened in 1962 by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

The British Library Bibliographic Services Division was formed from the British National Bibliography Ltd., an independent organization set up in 1949 to publish a weekly catalog of books published in the United Kingdom and received at the British Museum by legal deposit. The British National Bibliography, as this weekly catalog was called, quickly established itself as a foremost reference work, both for book selection and cataloging and for reference retrieval. After the reorganization of 1973 the division expanded the computerizing of current cataloging and the central provision of both printed cards and machine-readable entries. The BLAISE service (British Library Automated Information Service) offers a cataloging facility to any library wishing to participate, and the Bibliographic Services Division and its predecessor, the British National Bibliography, cooperated closely with the U.S. Library of Congress in the Project for Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC), which provides on-line access to the catalogs of the current acquisitions of the British Library Reference Division and the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress

The U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is probably the largest national library, and its collection of modern books is particularly extensive. It was founded in 1800 but lost many books by fire during a bombardment of the Capitol by British troops in 1814. These losses were to some extent made good by the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s library shortly thereafter. The library remained a strictly congressional library for many years, but, as the collections were notably enlarged by purchases and by additions under the copyright acts, the library became and remained—in effect, although not in law—the national library of the United States. The public has access to many of the collections.

Through a service begun by Herbert Putnam, librarian from 1889 to 1939, the Library of Congress makes its catalog available to many thousands of subscribing American libraries and institutions.

The library’s impact on librarianship has always been of the highest value. Through the Library of Congress Classification, the printed catalog cards, and MARC (see below Technical services: Cataloging), the library’s practices are widely followed. Its last great printed product was the 754-volume National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 Imprints. In 1983 the library began producing most of the National Union Catalog on microfiche (sheets of microfilm containing rows of microimages of pages of printed matter). It serves as a centralized bureau for information on the acquisition of materials worldwide and distributes cataloging data to other libraries. It also has taken a considerable role in the areas of materials preservation and the research and development of new methods of information storage.

Russian State Library

Of a size and importance comparable to the Library of Congress, the Russian State Library (formerly called the Lenin Library) in Moscow is the national library of Russia. It receives several copies of all publications from throughout the country and distributes copies to specialist libraries. It issues printed cards for the Bibliography of Periodicals, 1917–1947 and for a cooperative catalog that lists the holdings of the Russian State Library, the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library in St. Petersburg, the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences also in St. Petersburg, and the Central Book Office. It organizes domestic and international lending and exchanges and offers courses of lectures for professional education and also for readers. It formerly produced the Soviet Library–Bibliographical Classification scheme based on a Marxist-Leninist classification of knowledge.

Other national collections

There are many other national libraries with important collections and very long histories. The Bibliothèque Royale Albert I in Brussels, founded in 1837 and centred on the 15th-century collection of the dukes of Burgundy, is the national library of Belgium and the centre of the country’s library network; it maintains a regular lending service with the university libraries and with the large town library of Antwerp. The Dutch Royal Library in The Hague was founded in 1798, and it, too, is the centre of a well-developed interlibrary loan system. Because the unification of Italy in the 19th century brought together many city-states that had major libraries, the country has a number of national libraries, the chief being the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome, founded in 1875, and the historically richer Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale at Florence, founded in 1747. Other Italian national libraries are at Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin, and Venice. Germany was equally remarkable before World War II both for the importance of its state or provincial libraries and for the lack of a recognized national library. The former Preussische Staatsbibliothek was given national status in 1919. That library became East Germany’s national library after World War II. In 1990, after the reunification of Germany, the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt am Main was merged with the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig and the Deutsche Musikarchiv to form the national library of Germany. The Austrian National Library, founded by the emperor Maximilian I in 1493, has rich collections—notably of manuscripts from the Austrian monasteries and from the library of Matthias I Corvinus, dispersed after the capture of his capital, Buda, by the Turks in 1526. The National Library of Australia in Canberra, formally created by legislation in 1960, grew out of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, established in 1901.

The National Library of China in Peking consists of the books and archives from imperial libraries dating to the Southern Sung dynasty (founded 1127). It also contains inscribed tortoise shells and bones, ancient manuscripts, and block-printed volumes, as well as books from the Ch’ing dynasty, imperial colleges, and private collectors. The National Diet Library (1948) in Tokyo counts among its holdings some four million volumes. Based on the collections of the former Imperial Library (1872), it is organized like the U.S. Library of Congress and publishes a computer-generated national bibliography. The National Library of India (formerly the Imperial Library) in Calcutta was founded in 1903. It is the largest library in India and holds a fine collection of rare books and manuscripts. In some countries, such as Iceland , Norway, and Israel, the national library is combined with a university library.

University and research libraries

Before the invention of printing, it was common for students to travel long distances to hear famous teachers. Printing made it possible for copies of a teacher’s lectures to be widely disseminated, and from that point universities began to create great libraries. The Bodleian Library (originally established in the 14th century) at Oxford University and Harvard University Library (1638) at Cambridge, Mass., are superior to many national libraries in size and quality. In addition to a large central library, often spoken of as the heart of a university, there are often smaller, specialized collections in separate colleges and institutes. The academies of science in Russia and various other former Soviet republics and those in the countries of eastern Europe consist of groups of specialized institutes, and, while not all act as universities in awarding degrees, their research function has the same significance. Some, as in Hungary and Romania, serve as the national library.

In a university library many users may seek to use the same books at the same time. The difficulty of providing multiple copies has vexed most university librarians, who must balance slender resources against sometimes vociferous demand. To handle the problem, many libraries have set up a short-loan collection (typically called the reserve collection) from which books may be borrowed for as little as a few hours. The use of computers for circulation control has brought some relief through great flexibility of operation and capacity for instant recall of information on the whereabouts of a particular work.

The range of research carried out at a traditional university may encompass every aspect of every discipline, and even the largest university libraries have long recognized the need for cooperation with others, first in cataloging and later in acquisitions. Automation and computers have helped, too, by making it possible for readers in one library to consult the catalogs of others, as well as independent databases, indexes, and abstracts, by means of computer networks. The printing of multiple volumes of union catalogs, especially for periodicals, proved the value to scholars of sharing information on catalogs and collections. Many universities have made available catalogs of their special collections and have arranged for the reproduction both of rare individual works and of complete collections on microfilm and in other formats. An example is the Goldsmiths’-Kress collection of early works in economics, which combines the holdings of the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London and the Kress Library at Harvard.

Public libraries

Public libraries are now acknowledged to be an indispensable part of community life as promoters of literacy, providers of a wide range of reading for all ages, and centres for community information services. Yet, although the practice of opening libraries to the public has been known from ancient times, it was not without considerable opposition that the idea became accepted, in the 19th century, that a library’s provision was a legitimate charge on public funds. It required legislation to enable local authorities to devote funds to this cause.

Public libraries now provide well-stocked reference libraries and wide-ranging loan services based on systems of branch libraries. They are further supplemented by traveling libraries, which serve outlying districts. Special facilities may be provided for the old, the blind, the hearing-impaired, and others, and in many cases library services are organized for local schools, hospitals, and jails. In the case of very large municipalities, library provision may be on a grand scale, including a reference library, which has many of the features associated with large research libraries. The New York Public Library, for example, has rich collections in many research fields; and the Boston Public Library, the first of the great city public libraries in the United States (and the first to be supported by direct public taxation), has had from the first a twofold character as a library for scholarly research as well as for general reading. In the United Kingdom the first tax-supported public libraries were set up in 1850; they provide a highly significant part of the country’s total national library service. The importance of public library activities has been recognized in many countries by legislation designed to ensure that good library services are available to all without charge.

In many cases public libraries build up collections that relate to local interests, often providing information for local industry and commerce. It is becoming more usual for public libraries to lend music scores, phonograph records, compact discs, and, in some countries—notably Sweden and the United Kingdom—original works of art for enjoyment, against a deposit, in the home.

Not all countries provide public library services of an equally high standard, but there has been a tendency to recognize their value and to improve services where they exist or to introduce them where they do not. Public librarians work strenuously, through such organizations as the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), for such developments.

Special libraries

The national, university, and public libraries form the network of general libraries more or less accessible to the general public. They take pride in special collections, which are built around a special subject interest. Beyond this network are a large number of libraries established by special groups of users to meet their own needs. Many of these originated with learned societies and especially with the great scientific and engineering societies founded during the 19th century to provide specialist material for their members. Thus some special libraries were founded independently of public libraries and before major scientific departments were developed in national libraries; for example, the National Reference Library of Science and Invention, now the Science Reference Library and part of the British Library, was originally established at the U.K. Patent Office.

With the coming of the Industrial Revolution arose the need for a working class educated in technology, and industrialists and philanthropists provided facilities and books of elementary technical instruction. In the United Kingdom the Mechanics’ Institutes were founded in the rapidly growing industrial towns to provide books and lectures to workers and tradesmen at prices lower than those of the subscription libraries.

Special libraries are frequently attached to official institutions such as government departments, hospitals, museums, and the like. For the most part, however, they come into being in order to meet specific needs in commercial and industrial organizations. Special libraries are planned on strictly practical lines, with activities and collections carefully controlled in size and scope, even though these libraries may be and in fact often are large and wide-ranging in their activities; they cooperate widely with other libraries. They are largely concerned with communicating information to specialist users in response to—or preferably in anticipation of—their specific needs. Special libraries have therefore been much concerned with the theoretical investigation of information techniques, including the use of computers for indexing and retrieval. It was in this area that the concept of a science of information flow and transfer emerged as a new field of fundamental theoretical study. The concept underpins the practices not only of special libraries but of all types of library and information services.

School libraries

Where public libraries and schools are provided by the same education authority, the public library service may include a school department, which takes care of all routine procedures, including purchasing, processing with labels, and attaching book cards and protective covers; the books are sent to the schools ready for use. This is done in Denmark and in some parts of the United Kingdom. In other countries—the United States, for example—processing may be contracted out to a specialist supplier. In most countries, in fact, school and public libraries cooperate closely.

Teachers who take an interest in the school library make a considerable contribution to its progress, and many have acquired qualifications in librarianship, recognizing that a modern library requires full-time attention and a variety of skills. The school librarian must have a close knowledge of and sympathy with the work of the teaching staff. School libraries have been the scene of significant research and experiment with many different media, so much so that some school libraries have become resource centres. Teachers accustomed to using visual aids, often indeed to making their own, have come to expect the library to provide such materials as collections of photographs, slides, films and filmstrips, videotapes, and artifacts for work in subjects such as history and mathematics. Some school librarians use the term “realia” to describe these resources.

Private libraries

The libraries owned by private individuals are as varied in their range of interest as the individuals who collected them, and so they do not lend themselves to generalized treatment. The phrase private library is anyway unfortunate because it gives little idea of the public importance such libraries may have. Private collectors are often able to collect in depth on a subject to a degree usually impossible for a public institution; being known to booksellers and other collectors, they are likely to be given early information about books of interest to them; they can also give close attention to the condition of the books they buy. In these ways they add greatly to the sum of bibliographical knowledge (especially if they make their collections available to scholars).

Henry Clay Folger, for example, collected no fewer than 70 copies of one book—the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. (In 1932 he opened the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which had been built to house his collection.) As a result of his collecting he added greatly to the sum of knowledge about the printing of Shakespeare’s plays and about 17th-century printing in general. Collectors of private libraries have sometimes benefited posterity by leaving their collections to public institutions or founding a library. Examples in the United States include Henry E. Huntington, John Carter Brown, William L. Clements, and J.P. Morgan. The tradition has long been established in Europe, where many important libraries have been built up around the nucleus of a private collection.

Subscription libraries

Part public, part private, these libraries enjoyed much popularity from the late 17th to the 19th century. Many of them were set up by associations of scholarly professional groups for the benefit of academies, colleges, and institutions, but their membership was also open to the general public. Some of them are still in existence: perhaps the most famous are the Library Company of Philadelphia, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731; the Boston Athenaeum, founded in 1807; and the London Library, opened largely at the request of Thomas Carlyle in 1841, which today has a wide-ranging collection for loan to its members in their homes.

During the 19th century, the great size of many subscription libraries enabled them to wield much influence over publishers and authors: Mudie’s Circulating Library, for instance, established in London in 1842, would account for the sale of as much as 75 percent of a popular novel’s edition. Nevertheless, these libraries were for the most part unable to survive, and the service they gave is now largely provided by the free public libraries.


Archives are collections of papers, documents, and photographs (often unpublished or one-of-a-kind), and sometimes other materials that are preserved for historical reasons. They are created in the course of conducting business activities of a public or private body. Until the mid-15th century and the use of the printing press, such records were not distinguished from library materials and were preserved in the same places as other manuscripts. The importance now accorded to public records has been recognized as one outcome of the French Revolution, when for the first time an independent national system of archive administration was set up, for whose preservation and maintenance the state was responsible and to which there was public access.

While the administration of archives shares with libraries the basic obligation to collect, to preserve, and to make available, it has to employ different principles and management techniques. Libraries might be described as collecting agencies, whereas archival institutions are receiving agencies: they do not select—their function is to preserve documents as organic bodies of documentation. They must respect the integrity of these bodies of documents and maintain as far as possible the order in which they were created. And, of course, the documents need catalogs and finding aids, or guides.

A distinction has to be drawn between public and private archives. Every state, broadly speaking, now recognizes the need to preserve its own official records and is expected to maintain a system of archive administration, which has the function of collecting them, preserving them, and making them publicly available after the appropriate lapse of time. Among the best known are the Archives Nationales in France, the U.S. National Archives, and the British Public Record Office. Nonofficial archives—the records of the day-to-day activities of an institution or a business—are now recognized as having great value for socioeconomic history, and they are frequently sought by libraries for their historical value and preserved in manuscript and similar collections. It is the practice of many institutions, such as universities, professional and commercial organizations, and ecclesiastical establishments, to set up their own archive departments.