History of Libraries and Library’s History

Abstract

The History of Libraries is divided in two parts: one is the History of the Library, the other is the History of Libraries. The first one have to give a definition of the Library, find the origins and highlight the processes of growth and development. The second one have to tell the history of the most important and relevant libraries and of their influences on the evolution of a society or a nation. In this sense, the library has a high value when it is a valuable support to a job or a scientific activity. The bibliographic collection determines the quality of a library, and this quality is strictly connected to the selection of books. The bibliographic selection, in fact, when it is the result of a deliberate choice, creates a collection highly representative of the books at the time, giving to the scholar a faithful historical representation of the bibliographic reality and its relationships with the coeval cultural and scientific context. The great libraries created according to this accurate bibliographic selection permit to do a real History of Libraries, because of their highly representative collections and   the cultural and scientific context of their development. For these reasons, the libraries have to possess two requirements in order to be worthy of historical attention: a clear and unequivocal bibliographic bond that bind all the books of the collections  and a number of books enough elevate to constitute a representative view of the bibliographical reality at the time.