17th and 18th centuries and the great national libraries
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In the 17th and 18th centuries book collecting everywhere became more widespread. The motive sometimes was sheer ostentation, but often it was genuine love of scholarship. Throughout Europe and in North America, several fine private collections were assembled, many of which were eventually to become the core of today’s great national and state libraries—for this was also the period that saw the establishment of new national and university collections.
There were, of course, other developments. In England there were established a number of parish libraries, attached to churches and chiefly intended for the use of the clergy (one of the earliest, at Grantham in Lincolnshire, was set up as early as 1598, and some of its original chained books are still to be seen there). They were sometimes the result of lay donation: a Manchester merchant, Humphrey Chetham, left money in 1653 for the foundation of parish libraries in Bolton and Manchester and also for the establishment of a town library in Manchester (which still exists, housed in its original bookcases, in its original building). Later, in the 18th century, especially in England (though also elsewhere in Europe) and the United States, there was a great vogue for the circulating and subscription libraries—societies that provided reference service and lending collections for their members and had much influence on the formation of popular literary taste, especially in fiction.
Library planning
The private libraries of powerful and influential collectors, such as Cardinal Mazarin in France, were so large that a new approach to library organization was needed. The Escorial library in Madrid, erected in 1584, had been the first to do away with the medieval book bays, which were set at right angles to the light source, and to arrange its collection in cases lining the walls. The old practice of chaining books to their cases was gradually abandoned; and the change to the present arrangement, standing books with their spines facing outward, began in France—probably with the personal library of the lawyer, councillor of state, historian, and bibliophile Jacques-Auguste de Thou (d. 1617). Mazarin’s library was in the charge of Gabriel Naudé, who produced the first modern treatise on library economy, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627; Advice on Establishing a Library). This work marked the transition to the age of modern library practice. One of its first fruits was the library of the diarist Samuel Pepys; in the last 14 years of his life Pepys devoted much time to the organization of his collection, and he left it to Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Naudé’s concept of a scholarly library, systematically arranged, displaying the whole of recorded knowledge and open to all scholars, took root. It was above all absorbed by the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), a prominent librarian of his age, who conceived the idea of a national bibliographical organization that would provide the scholar with easy access to all that had been written on his subject.
Emergence of national collections
The scope of European scholarship and inquiry expanded rapidly during the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in the field of historical studies and in philosophy. In France, de Thou, highly qualified as a collector, was made director in 1593 of the Bibliothèque du Roi (founded by Charles V and largely reorganized during the 15th century by Louis XII). Mazarin’s library was scattered when he was compelled to leave France during the period of unrest known as the Fronde, but it was reassembled when he returned to power in 1653. Rehoused in a new building, it was opened to the public in 1691. It remained one of France’s great libraries until after the French Revolution, when it was incorporated with other collections (including the Bibliothèque du Roi) to form the Bibliothèque Nationale, today one of the world’s great libraries. August, Duke von Braunschweig, established a library in 1604 that later became the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel, one of the finest libraries in Europe (Leibniz was its librarian from 1690 to 1716). A library assembled by the elector Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg was founded in 1659 and later became the Prussian State Library. The collections of the English book collectors Sir Hans Sloane, Sir Robert Cotton, and Edward and Robert Harley, earls of Oxford, formed the basis of the British Museum collection (1753), which was enlarged in 1757 by the addition of the Royal Library, containing books collected by the kings of England from Edward IV to George II.
The effects of the French Revolution
On the continent of Europe the anticlerical movement that found expression in revolution sealed the fate of many monastic and church libraries: those in France, for example, were expropriated in 1789; in Germany in 1803; in Spain in 1835. In France books were collected in the main towns of the départements in what were called dépots littéraires. In 1792 the same fate befell the collections of aristocratic families, and these, too, were added to the dépots. The enormous accumulations caused problems, and many books were lost, but the plan of coordinating library resources throughout the country was carried out. The Bibliothèque Nationale received some 300,000 volumes, and new libraries were set up in many important provincial cities. In Bavaria the state library was greatly enriched by the contents of more than 150 confiscated libraries, and many of the provincial libraries were similarly enlarged. In Austria, as a result of confiscations, Studienbibliotheken (study libraries) were set up at Linz, Klagenfurt, and Salzburg, the university libraries at Graz and Innsbruck were substantially enlarged, and many valuable acquisitions accrued to the Hofbibliothek in Vienna.
Later developments
The difficulties of library management grew in the 19th century. Libraries had increased in size, but their growth had been haphazard; administration had become weak, standards of service almost nonexistent; funds for acquisition tended to be inadequate; the post of librarian was often looked on as a part-time position; and cataloging was frequently in arrears and lacked proper method.
The university library at Göttingen was a notable exception. Johann Gesner, the first librarian, working in close association with the curator of the university, G.A. von Münchhausen, and proceeding on the principles laid down by Leibniz, made strenuous efforts to cover all departments of learning; the library provided good catalogs of carefully selected literature and was available to all as liberally as possible. The library’s next director, C.G. Heyne, enthusiastically followed the same principles, with the result that Göttingen became the best-organized library in the world.
A leading figure in the transformation of library service was Antonio (later Sir Anthony) Panizzi, a political refugee from Italy who began working for the British Museum in 1831 and was its principal librarian from 1856 to 1866. From the start he revolutionized library administration, demonstrating that the books in a library should match its declared objectives and showing what these objectives should be in the case of a great national library. He perceived the importance of a good catalog and to this end elaborated a complete code of rules for catalogers. He also saw the potential of libraries in a modern community as instruments of study and research, available to all, and, by his planning of the British Museum reading room and its accompanying bookstacks, showed how this potential might be realized. His ideas long dominated library thought in the field of scholarly—or, as they are now called, research—libraries and achieved major expression in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
By the middle of the 19th century the idea had been accepted that community libraries might be provided by local authorities at public expense. This proved a significant stage in the development of library provision. Panizzi had stated that he wanted the facilities of a great library to be available to poor students so that they could indulge their “learned curiosity”; in England in 1850 an act of Parliament was passed enabling local councils to levy a rate for the provision of free library facilities.
The paradigm for libraries and librarianship shifted radically in the 20th century with the advent of new information technologies. By the end of the century, computer-based systems had given individuals access to an enormous network of information. Especially in the world’s major urban centres, the library’s traditional means of sharing access to information, such as the owning and lending of books and other materials or the sharing of these resources with sister libraries, were increasingly supplanted by the use of electronic databases that contained everything from library catalogs and subject area indexes and abstracts to journal articles and entire book-length texts. As individuals using home computers became familiar with a worldwide electronic network, the library as a storehouse site was challenged by the so-called virtual library, accessible by computer from any place that had telephone or cable lines. The role of the professional librarian also evolved, as many were called upon to be familiar with and to train others to use a variety of electronic databases.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica