A public library is a library, most often a lending library, that is accessible by the general public and is usually funded from public sources, such as taxes. It is operated by librarians and library paraprofessionals, who are also civil servants.
Public libraries are supported by taxes, are open to all who wish to access the library collection, and do not charge money for access to the library collection.Rubin, Richard E. Foundations of Library and Information Science (3rd ed). 2010. Neal-Schuman Publishers: New York.
Public libraries exist in many countries across the world and are often considered an essential part of having an educated and literate population. Public libraries are distinct from research libraries, school libraries, academic libraries in other states and other special libraries. Their mandate is to serve the general public's information needs rather than the needs of a particular school, institution, or research population. Public libraries also provide free services such as preschool story times to encourage early literacy among children. They also provide a quiet study and learning areas for students and professionals and foster the formation of book clubs to encourage the appreciation of literature by the young and adults. Public libraries typically allow users to borrow books and other materials outside the library premises temporarily, usually for a given period of time. In addition to their traditional role of circulating collections of books and media, public libraries serve as vital hubs that offer essential non-circulating reference resources and provide diverse community members with equitable access to modern computing technology and the internet.
Overview The culmination of centuries of advances in the printing press, moveable type, paper, ink, publishing, and distribution, combined with an ever-growing information-oriented middle class, increased commercial activity and consumption, new radical ideas, massive population growth and higher literacy rates forged the public library into the form that it is today.
Public access to books is not new. Romans made scrolls in dry rooms available to patrons of the baths, and tried with some success to establish libraries within the empire. Public libraries existed in the Roman Empire by the 1st century BC.
In the middle of the 19th century, the push for truly public libraries, paid for by taxes and run by the state gained force. Matthew Battles states that: It was in these years of class conflict and economic terror that the public library movement swept through Britain, as the nation's progressive elite recognized that the light of cultural and intellectual energy was lacking in the lives of commoners.Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. New York, NY: Norton, 2004, p. 135.
Public libraries were often started with a donation, or were bequeathed to parishes, churches, schools or towns. These social and institutional libraries formed the base of many academic and public library collections of today.Bill, Katz. Dahl's History of the Book, No. 2. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995, p. 238.
The establishment of circulating libraries in the 18th century by booksellers and publishers provided a means of gaining profit and creating social centers within the community. The circulating libraries not only provided a place to sell books, but also a place to lend books for a price. These circulating libraries provided a variety of materials including the increasingly popular novels. Although the circulating libraries filled an important role in society, members of the middle and upper classes often looked down upon these libraries that regularly sold material from their collections and provided materials that were less sophisticated.
Circulating libraries also charged a subscription fee. However, these fees were set to entice their patrons, providing subscriptions on a yearly, quarterly or monthly basis, without expecting the subscribers to purchase a share in the circulating library. This helped patrons who could not afford to buy books, to be able to borrow books to read, and then return. This also created a more popular demand, as book fees were growing, and more books were being copied. Circulating libraries were very popular; the first one was located in 1725, in Edinburgh, Scotland, by Allan Ramsay.
Circulating libraries were not exclusively lending institutions and often provided a place for other forms of commercial activity, which may or may not be related to print. This was necessary because the circulating libraries did not generate enough funds through subscription fees collected from its borrowers. As a commerce venture, it was important to consider the contributing factors such as other goods or services available to the subscribers.Raven, James. "Libraries for sociability: the advance of subscription library." The Cambridge History Of Libraries In Britain And Ireland. 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 251-253.
History
Early history
The first libraries consisted of archives of the earliest form of writing – the clay tablets in cuneiform script discovered in temple rooms in Sumer, some dating back to 2600 BC. They appeared five thousand years ago in Southwest Asia's Fertile Crescent, an area that ran from Mesopotamia to the Nile in Africa. Known as the cradle of civilization, the Fertile Crescent was likewise the birthplace of writing, sometime before 3000 BC. These first libraries, which mainly consisted of the records of commercial transactions or inventories, mark the end of prehistory and the start of history.Renfrew, Colin (2008) Prehistory The Making of the Human Mind, New York: Modern Library.
Things were very similar in the government and temple records on papyrus of Ancient Egypt. The earliest discovered private archives were kept at Ugarit; besides correspondence and inventories, texts of myths may have been standardized practice-texts for teaching new scribes.
Persia at the time of the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC) was home to some outstanding libraries that served two main functions: keeping the records of administrative documents (e.g., transactions, governmental orders, and budget allocation within and between the Satrapies and the central ruling State)Rajabi, Parviz. 1381. The lost Milleniums, Vol. 3, Toos Publication, . and collection of resources on different sets of principles e.g. medical science, astronomy, history, geometry and philosophy.
A public library was established in Rome by the first century BC, in the Atrium Libertatis (see and ). However, the first major public library is said to have been established in Athens by Pisistratus in the sixth century BC (see ), and by the end of the Hellenistic period, public libraries are said to have been widespread in the Eastern Mediterranean (see ).
Historian Yahya of Antioch (d. 1066) reported that the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah () financed and established libraries open to the public, where anyone, even the simple non-specialists, could choose whatever books they wanted and have them copied by public scribes, free of charge. However, as with many of his other decisions, Al-Hakim later ordered this policy to be reversed.
The Malatestiana Library () in Cesena, Italy, is regarded as the first community-run public library in Europe. The building and creation of the library was commissioned by the Lord of Cesena, Malatesta Novello. At Novello's direction, the books were owned by the commune of Cesena, not the monastery or the family. It was established in 1447 with the building completed in 1452 and provided secular and religious works in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and was institutionally open to all members of the public as a civic, non-monastic library. The library was organized as a chained library, with each manuscript fixed to its desk or bookcase by a metal chain, and the collection was for consultation on site rather than for lending.
Another early library that allowed access to the public was Kalendars or Kalendaries, a brotherhood of clergy and laity who were attached to the Church of All-Halloween or All Saints in Bristol, England. Records show that in 1464, provision was made for a library to be erected in the house of the Kalendars. A reference is made to a deed of that date by which it was "appointed that all who wish to enter for the sake of instruction shall have 'free access and recess' at certain times."
In 1598, Francis Trigge established a library in a room above St. Wulfram's Church in Grantham, Lincolnshire and decreed that it should be open to the clergy and residents of the surrounding neighborhood. Some scholars consider this library an "ancestor" to public libraries since its patrons did not need to belong to an existing organization like a church or college to use it. However, all the books in the library were chained to stalls, hence its name: the Francis Trigge Chained Library.
In the early years of the 17th century, many famous collegiate and town libraries were founded in England. Norwich City library was established in 1608 (six years after Thomas Bodley founded the Bodleian Library, which was open to the "whole republic of the learned") and Chetham's Library in Manchester, which claims to be the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, opened in 1653.
Biblioteca Palafoxiana, a 17th‑century baroque library in Puebla, Mexico, is considered the first public library in the Americas and recognized by UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. Founded in 1646 by Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, it began with his donation of 5,000 books to be accessible to all. The current hall, completed in 1773, now preserves over 41,000–45,000 volumes and manuscripts from the 15th to 20th centuries, including incunabula like the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, the oldest text in the library.
In his seminal work (1644) the French scholar and librarian Gabriel Naudé asserted that only three libraries in all Europe granted in his times regular access to every scholar, namely the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the in Rome, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Enlightenment-era libraries At the start of the 18th century, libraries were becoming increasingly public and were more frequently lending libraries. The 18th century saw the switch from closed parochial libraries to lending libraries. Before this time, public libraries were parochial in nature, and libraries frequently chained their books to desks.Kelly, Thomas (1966). Early Public Libraries: a history of public libraries in Great Britain before 1850 London: Library Association; p. 94. Libraries also were not uniformly open to the public.
In Britain, Chetham's Library, established in Manchester in 1653, was the only important library that was fully and freely accessible to the public.Kelly, Thomas (1966); p. 185. In 1715 a small theological library was founded for general use at St Peter's Church, Liverpool, although an inventory of the church's goods taken in 1893 recorded that the library's existence was not widely known amongst Liverpool people and that there was a misconception amongst parishioners that it was for the exclusive use of the clergy. The Chesshyre Library in Halton, Cheshire, was founded as a free public library in 1733 for all "divines of the Church of England or other gentlemen or persons of letters", but it was limited to just 422 volumes of mostly ecclesiastical and legal works..