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From Rome to the Internet
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The Roman civiliztion was a peak in both techonology and culture. After Rome's fall, its many libraries fell into disuse. The Catholic Church became the main keeper of libraries in the form of religious texts.
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An order from the council decreed lending books an act of mercy. This concept of book lending as only natural has stayed with us into modern days.
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With the Rennaissance, the demand for knowledge once again was high. Groups of scholars began to form libraries based around certain schools of thought, and academies were built around these libraries.
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With the invention of the printing press, libraries were forever revolutionized. Knowledge became far more accessible to the public. Instead of being coveted and protected, books were read by a wide range of audiences.
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With the establishment of the Oxford library, among several other libraries, a golden age is sparked for libraries.
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Thomas Jefferson, among other things, was a great collector of books. After the Congressional Library was burned in the War of 1812, the Library of Congress was formed on this date when Jefferson sold 6,700 of his books to Congress.
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This library established the concept of the public library, that libraries were not just for professionals, but people of all ages and walks of life in community. Every public library thereafter was based on this concept.
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The Dewey Decimal system revolutionized the way books are categorized. It grouped books by subject and made them extremely easy to locate and retrieve. This system is currently used in around 200,000 libraries in 132 countries.
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In Braddock, Pennsylvania Carnegie built the first of 2,509 public libraries in America. he would not only brings library access to areas it never was, he would make the public library a necessity in every community.
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This early version of the internet would bring computers and the internet into the public consciousness. Personal computers would later become an integral part of every library, holding datatbases of information online and cataloguing books for easy location.
