Libraries, Functions and Types Of
The word "library" was originally drawn from the Latin term liber, which means book. Historically, the libraries of the world have been closely identified with the books that came to fill their respective shelves. As recent as the 1980s, it would have been possible to define the nature and future of libraries in terms quite similar to those used in the description of libraries in the fifteenth, the eighteenth, and the mid-twentieth centuries. For it is apparent to even the most casual of students that the character of libraries has remained remarkably stable throughout some four millennia. Across those four thousand years, librarians constructed libraries large and small that were designed to effectively collect, organize, preserve, and makeaccessible the graphic records of society. In practical terms, this meant that librarians, the managers of these ever-growing libraries, collected large numbers of books and periodicals, arranged them for relatively easy use, and made these collections accessible to at least part of the community (if not the whole community). This broad definition of the nature and function of libraries served quite nicely until recently.
What shattered this timeless consistency, of course, was the emergence of information technology (IT) and the onset of the "information era." The emergence of the e-book, the e-journal, and hypertext writing systems appears to be rapidly undermining previous commitments to the print-on-paper communication system that played such a fundamental part in constituting the libraries of the world.
