World Public Library
2017
Franklin D. Roosevelt - “The public library is a nation’s act of believing in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgement in creating their own future.” The traditional library is changing, fast. Paper books,and the multi-level structures that house them, are becoming a thing of the past while digital books, eBooks, pave the way for a new future of instant, worldwide accessibility to knowledge. The World Public Library is at the forefront of this movement. I. History A. Purpose of the Library 1. Origins Hi, I’m Mia with the World Public Library and I would like to invite you on a journey through the library’s past present and future. Along the way we will explore what has made the library such a unique and important place historically and what the World Public Library is doing today to make the library more useful and vital than ever before. It’s impossible to think about the progress mankind has made without calculating the role that the library has played. Any city that has had a great impact on learning has had a great library behind it, fueling that learning. Libraries date back to 1900 BC in the Sumerian city of Nippur. Nippur’s library held tens of thousands of inscribed clay tablets. These tablets themselves dated as far back as 2600 BC and included mathematical tables and almanacs. The first great library was founded in 290 B.C. by the Ptolemy dynasty in Alexandria, Egypt. The Library of Alexandria, as it came to be known, housed between a quarter of a million and half a million papyrus scrolls. The library tried to acquire copies of all writings, sending agents far and wide to acquire texts. Scrolls were bought, copied and stolen. Boats visiting Alexandria were required to lend any writings on board to the library for the purpose of copying; some were returned. Tragically, the Library of Alexandria was destroyed by mobs, sometime in the 3rd or 4th century A.D. As impressive as these libraries were, neither allowe
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