The Beginnings of Libraries

by Ernest Cushing Richardson

The use of basketry work and perhaps other textile work as bookcase also certainly extended back into pre-phonetic times and is represented in primitive usage.

It is not to be supposed, of course, that in these primitive times there were often separate buildings, such as the later Greek treasuries, or even separate rooms as in the Egyptian temples, and the archives at Boghaz Keuei and elsewhere, although separate huts for these and especially for “collections of liturgical objects” would perhaps be almost the first use for covered rooms, while sacrificing was still conducted in the open air.

Something like a pouch or wallet must have been used for the marked pebbles of the Stone Age and for pebble counting generally before the grooves and rods of the abacus were invented.

The method of keeping and displaying the books in the boxes, pouches, rooms or buildings, varied of course according to the nature of the document. In the modern library there is a great difference between the machinery necessary to keep and display folded documents, rolled documents, and ordinary bound books. The pouch may have had compartments like a modern purse. Basketry, clay and wood cases did have compartments, one for each roll, in quite early papyrus days.

In some of the late Babylonian libraries the clay tablets were evidently displayed on shelves but they were more commonly kept in clay boxes or jars, alabaster boxes, and the like, after the general fashion of the treasuries in earlier times and until the quantity became great. Twig records were tied together in bundles, and the stringing together of records was one of the earliest and most extensively used methods. It may perhaps be said that it was the typical method of the earliest records. It is found in the stringing together of trophy objects for wearing on the person—necklaces, girdles, and draped strings of various trophies. It is found also early in the history of the abacus where the perforated pebbles or beads were strung on different rods set in the ground, and it is of course found in the developed abacus. The perforations of tablets, bearing the year marks, among the objects from the earliest dynasties at Abydos, suggest a stringing together of these annual records, although it is of course possible that these are labels and the perforations used to attach them to boxes. The analogy with annual records of primitive people, however, suggests this stringing together.

What may be called classification of these libraries is found very early. It is reflected perhaps in the early distinction between temple and palace libraries, and more clearly in the primitive distinction between shamans and secular recorders. The putting of like kinds of works in boxes together, medical works, etc., is found as early as 2700 B.C. in Egypt and quite early in Crete. The labels of Crete point to a classification of objects if not of object records.

When collections are small no cataloguing is necessary excepting in the librarian’s mind, and his first mnemonic aid is classification, which is in fact a sort of cataloguing and takes the place of all other cataloguing. It is to be noted that in the very earliest records the librarian goes with the king or the investigating committee when they go to look up the records.

§ 20. The beginnings of library schools

The library school is commonly regarded as, and is, in a sense, a product of the last century. Library schools are, therefore, still a new thing. It may not seem so to you who had not been born when some of us were lecturing at that first American library school up at Columbia University, but it is the fact that the teachers of that school are still living and teaching, and there were no schools of library economy strictly speaking when they began. The well fledged library school as an avowed school and independent unit is a product of this generation.

Nevertheless library schools too have had their beginnings. In the immediate past schools or university courses of palaeography or archival science have been practically library schools. In European countries, where the handling of documents and manuscripts have been so much the more difficult share of the problem that library economy and all the rest has been counted negligible and has in fact been neglected, these were real library schools, in that they were chiefly or wholly intended for and used by those who were intending to be librarians. They taught in fact the things which were most expected of the librarians, just as the modern schools, in teaching almost exclusively business and administrative methods, teach the things which the moderns expect of their librarians. They were and are, therefore, very one-sided library schools, lopsided on the science side, and yet perhaps not more lopsided than our own schools are on the side of library economy.