List of national libraries

This is a list of national libraries of the world. A national library is a library specifically established by the government of a nation to serve as the preeminent repository of information for that country. Unlike public libraries, these rarely allow citizens to borrow books. Often, they include numerous rare, valuable, or significant works; such as the Library of Congress's Gutenberg Bible. National libraries are usually notable for their size, compared to that of other libraries in the same country. Some national libraries may be thematic or specialized in some specific domains, beside or in replacement of the 'main' national library.

Some national entities which are not independent but who wish to preserve their particular culture, have established a national library with all the attributes of such institutions, such as legal deposit.

Many national libraries cooperate within the National Libraries Section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) to discuss their common tasks, define and promote common standards and carry out projects helping them to fulfil their duties. National libraries of Europe participate in The European Library. This is a service of The Conference of European National Librarians (CENL).

The list below is organized alphabetically by country, according to the list of sovereign states, including, at its end an 'other states' section for non-sovereign states. A "*" indicates a national library of a constituent country or dependent state. It is listed under the sovereign state which governs that entity. Sovereign states are listed even when they have no national library or when the existence and name of a national library could not yet be ascertained. Other states, constituent countries and dependent states are listed only if they have a national library.

Shift to digital libraries

Interior of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, showing both stacks and computer terminals

Interior of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, showing both stacks and computer terminals

In the past couple of years, more and more people are using the Internet to gather and retrieve data. The shift to digital libraries has greatly impacted the average person's use of physical libraries. Between 2002 and 2004, the average American academic library saw its overall number of transactions decline approximately 2.2%.[34] Libraries are trying to keep up with the digital world and the new generation of students that are used to having information just one click away. For example, The University of California Library System saw a 54% decline in circulation between 1991 to 2001 of 8,377,000 books to 3,832,000.[35]

These facts might be a consequence of the increased availability of e-resources. In 1999-2000, 105 ARL university libraries spent almost $100 million on electronic resources, which is an increase of nearly $23 million from the previous year.[36] A 2003 report by the Open E-book Forum found that close to a million e-books had been sold in 2002, generating nearly $8 million in revenue.[37] Another example of the shift to digital libraries can be seen in Cushing Academy’s decision to dispense with its library of printed books — more than 20,000 volumes in all — and switch over entirely to digital media resources.[38]

One claim to why there is a decrease in the usage of libraries stems from the observation of the research habits of undergraduate students enrolled in colleges and universities. There have been claims that college undergraduates have become more used to retrieving information from the Internet than a traditional library. As each generation becomes more in tune with the Internet, their desire to retrieve information as quickly and easily as possible has increased. No doubt finding information by simply searching the Internet is much easier and faster than reading an entire book. In a survey conducted by NetLibrary, 93% of undergraduate students claimed that finding information online makes more sense to them than going to the library. Also, 75% of students surveyed claimed that they did not have enough time to go to the library and that they liked the convenience of the Internet. While the retrieving information from the Internet may be efficient and time saving than visiting a traditional library, research has shown that undergraduates are most likely searching only .03% of the entire web.[39] The information that they are finding might be easy to retrieve and more readily available, but may not be as in depth as information from other resources such as the books available at a physical library.

In the mid 2000s Swedish company Distec invented a library book vending machine known as the GoLibrary, that offers library books to people where there is no branch, limited hours, or high traffic locations such as El Cerrito del Norte BART station in California.

Types

                                    Smaller libraries can sometimes be found in private homes.        

Libraries can be divided into categories by several methods:
By the entity (institution, municipality, or corporate body) that supports or perpetuates them
academic libraries
corporate libraries
government libraries, such as national libraries
historical society libraries
private libraries
public libraries
school libraries
special libraries
By the type of documents or materials they hold
data libraries
digital libraries
map libraries or collections
picture (photograph) libraries
slide libraries
tool libraries
By the subject matter of documents they hold
architecture libraries
fine arts libraries
law libraries
medical libraries
aquatic science libraries
theological libraries
By the users they serve
military communities
users who are blind or visually/physically handicapped (see National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped)
prisons
By traditional professional divisions
Academic libraries — These libraries are located on the campuses of colleges and universities and serve primarily the students and faculty of that and other academic institutions. Some academic libraries, especially those at public institutions, are accessible to members of the general public in whole or in part.
Public libraries or public lending libraries — These libraries provide service to the general public and make at least some of their books available for borrowing, so that readers may use them at home over a period of days or weeks. Typically, libraries issue library cards to community members wishing to borrow books. Many public libraries also serve as community organizations that provide free services and events to the public, such as reading groups and toddler story time.
Research libraries — These libraries are intended for supporting scholarly research, and therefore maintain permanent collections and attempt to provide access to all necessary material. Research libraries are most often academic libraries or national libraries, but many large special libraries have research libraries within their special field and a very few of the largest public libraries also serve as research libraries.
School libraries — Most public and private primary and secondary schools have libraries designed to support the school's curriculum.
Special libraries — All other libraries fall into this category. Many private businesses and public organizations, including hospitals, museums, research laboratories, law firms, and many government departments and agencies, maintain their own libraries for the use of their employees in doing specialized research related to their work. Special libraries may or may not be accessible to some identified part of the general public. Branches of a large academic or research libraries dealing with particular subjects are also usually called "special libraries": they are generally associated with one or more academic departments. Special libraries are distinguished from special collections, which are branches or parts of a library intended for rare books, manuscripts, and similar material.

Many institutions make a distinction between circulating libraries (where materials are expected and intended to be loaned to patrons, institutions, or other libraries) and collecting libraries (where the materials are selected on a basis of their natures or subject matter). Many modern libraries are a mixture of both, as they contain a general collection for circulation, and a reference collection which is often more specialized, as well as restricted to the library premises.

A cabinet of books in the Tian Yi Chamber, the oldest extant library in China, dating to 1561.

Islamic libraries

A cabinet of books in the Tian Yi Chamber, the oldest extant library in China, dating to 1561. 

Upon the spread of Islam, libraries in newly Islamic lands knew a brief period of expansion in the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and Spain. Like the Christian libraries, they mostly contained books which were made of paper, and took a codex or modern form instead of scrolls; they could be found in mosques, private homes, and universities, from Timbuktu to Afghanistan. In Aleppo, for example, the largest and probably the oldest mosque library, the Sufiya, located at the city's Grand Umayyad Mosque, contained a large book collection of which 10,000 volumes were reportedly bequeathed by the city's most famous ruler, Prince Sayf al-Dawla.[13] Some mosques sponsored public libraries. Ibn al-Nadim's bibliography Fihrist demonstrates the devotion of medieval Muslim scholars to books and reliable sources; it contains a description of thousands of books circulating in the Islamic world circa 1000, including an entire section for books about the doctrines of other religions. Modern Islamic libraries for the most part do not hold these antique books; many were lost, destroyed by Mongols, or removed to European libraries and museums during the colonial period.[14]

Qur'an manuscript on display at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

By the 8th century first Iranians and then Arabs had imported the craft of papermaking from China, with a paper mill already at work in Baghdad in 794. By the 9th century completely public libraries started to appear in many Islamic cities. They were called "halls of Science" or dar al-'ilm. They were each endowed by Islamic sects with the purpose of representing their tenets as well as promoting the dissemination of secular knowledge. The 9th century Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil of Iraq, even ordered the construction of a ‘zawiyat qurra literally an enclosure for readers which was `lavishly furnished and equipped.' In Shiraz Adhud al-Daula (d. 983) set up a library, described by the medieval historian, al-Muqaddasi, as`a complex of buildings surrounded by gardens with lakes and waterways. The buildings were topped with domes, and comprised an upper and a lower story with a total, according to the chief official, of 360 rooms.... In each department, catalogues were placed on a shelf... the rooms were furnished with carpets...'.[15] The libraries often employed translators and copyists in large numbers, in order to render into Arabic the bulk of the available Persian, Greek, Roman and Sanskrit non-fiction and the classics of literature. This flowering of Islamic learning ceased centuries later when learning began declining in the Islamic world, after many of these libraries were destroyed by Mongol invasions. Others were victim of wars and religious strife in the Islamic world. However, a few examples of these medieval libraries, such as the libraries of Chinguetti in West Africa, remain intact and relatively unchanged even today. Another ancient library from this period which is still operational and expanding is the Central Library of Astan Quds Razavi in the Iranian city of Mashhad, which has been operating for more than six centuries.

A number of distinct features of the modern library were introduced in the Islamic world, where libraries not only served as a collection of manuscripts as was the case in ancient libraries, but also as a public library and lending library, a center for the instruction and spread of sciences and ideas, a place for meetings and discussions, and sometimes as a lodging for scholars or boarding school for pupils. The concept of the library catalogue was also introduced in medieval Islamic libraries, where books were organized into specific genres and categories.[16]

The contents of these Islamic libraries were copied by Christian monks in Muslim/Christian border areas, particularly Spain and Sicily. From there they eventually made their way into other parts of Christian Europe. These copies joined works that had been preserved directly by Christian monks from Greek and Roman originals, as well as copies Western Christian monks made of Byzantine works. The resulting conglomerate libraries are the basis of every modern library today.

Ancient Chinese libraries

A cabinet of books in the Tian Yi Chamber, the oldest extant library in China, dating to 1561.

The imperial library is the earliest known Chinese library, with history dating back to the Qin Dynasty. Han Chinese scholar Liu Hsiang established the first library classification system during the Han Dynasty,[12] and the first book notation system. At this time the library catalog was written on scrolls of fine silk and stored in silk bags.

Libraries in the Hellenic world and Rome

 

Inscription regarding Tiberius Claudius Balbilus of Rome (d. c. AD 79), which confirms that the Library of Alexandria must have existed in some form in the first century.[citation needed]

Private or personal libraries made up of non-fiction and fiction books (as opposed to the state or institutional records kept in archives) appeared in classical Greece in the 5th century BC. The celebrated book collectors of Hellenistic Antiquity were listed in the late 2nd century in Deipnosophistae:[7]

Polycrates of Samos and Pisistratus who was tyrant of Athens, and Euclides who was himself also an Athenian[8] and Nicorrates of Samos and even the kings of Pergamos, and Euripides the poet and Aristotle the philosopher, and Nelius his librarian; from whom they say our countryman[9] Ptolemæus, surnamed Philadelphus, bought them all, and transported them, with all those which he had collected at Athens and at Rhodes to his own beautiful Alexandria.[10]

All these libraries were Greek; the cultivated Hellenized diners in Deipnosophistae pass over the libraries of Rome in silence. By the time of Augustus there were public libraries near the forums of Rome: there were libraries in the Porticus Octaviae near the Theatre of Marcellus, in the temple of Apollo Palatinus, and in the Bibliotheca Ulpiana in the Forum of Trajan. The state archives were kept in a structure on the slope between the Roman Forum and the Capitoline Hill.

Private libraries appeared during the late republic: Seneca inveighed against libraries fitted out for show by aliterate owners who scarcely read their titles in the course of a lifetime, but displayed the scrolls in bookcases (armaria) of citrus wood inlaid with ivory that ran right to the ceiling: "by now, like bathrooms and hot water, a library is got up as standard equipment for a fine house (domus).[11] Libraries were amenities suited to a villa, such as Cicero's at Tusculum, Maecenas's several villas, or Pliny the Younger's, all described in surviving letters. At the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, apparently the villa of Caesar's father-in-law, the Greek library has been partly preserved in volcanic ash; archaeologists speculate that a Latin library, kept separate from the Greek one, may await discovery at the site.

In the West, the first public libraries were established under the Roman Empire as each succeeding emperor strove to open one or many which outshone that of his predecessor. Unlike the Greek libraries, readers had direct access to the scrolls, which were kept on shelves built into the walls of a large room. Reading or copying was normally done in the room itself. The surviving records give only a few instances of lending features. As a rule, Roman public libraries were bilingual: they had a Latin room and a Greek room. Most of the large Roman baths were also cultural centers, built from the start with a library, a two room arrangement with one room for Greek and one for Latin texts.

Remains of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus.

Libraries were filled with parchment scrolls as at Library of Pergamum and on papyrus scrolls as at Alexandria: the export of prepared writing materials was a staple of commerce. There were a few institutional or royal libraries which were open to an educated public (such as the Serapeum collection of the Library of Alexandria, once the largest library in the ancient world),[2] but on the whole collections were private. In those rare cases where it was possible for a scholar to consult library books there seems to have been no direct access to the stacks. In all recorded cases the books were kept in a relatively small room where the staff went to get them for the readers, who had to consult them in an adjoining hall or covered walkway.

800px-Celsus-Bibliothek

In the 6th century, at the very close of the Classical period, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world remained those of Constantinople and Alexandria. Cassiodorus, minister to Theodoric, established a monastery at Vivarium in the heel of Italy with a library where he attempted to bring Greek learning to Latin readers and preserve texts both sacred and secular for future generations. As its unofficial librarian, Cassiodorus not only collected as many manuscripts as he could, he also wrote treatises aimed at instructing his monks in the proper uses of reading and methods for copying texts accurately. In the end, however, the library at Vivarium was dispersed and lost within a century.

Through Origen and especially the scholarly presbyter Pamphilus of Caesarea, an avid collector of books of Scripture, the theological school of Caesarea won a reputation for having the most extensive ecclesiastical library of the time, containing more than 30,000 manuscripts: Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Jerome and others come studied there.

With education firmly in Christian hands, however, many of the works of classical antiquity were no longer considered useful.[citation needed] Old texts were washed off and the valuable parchment and papyrus were reused, forming palimpsests. As scrolls gave way to the new book-form, the codex was universally used for Christian literature. Old manuscript scrolls were cut apart and used to stiffen leather bindings.[citation needed]

Inscription regarding Tiberius Claudius Balbilus of Rome (d. c. AD 79), which confirms that the Library of Alexandria must have existed in some form in the first century.[citation needed]

The Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine

Main scientific information centre of the country.

The Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine is the largest library in the country, established in 1918 as a center for information, research, culture and publishing.

The collection contains more than 15 million items. This unique collection includes books, magazines, serials, maps, sheet music, fine arts materials, manuscripts, rare printed books and incunabula, newspapers, and documents of untraditional materials. The library has the most complete collection of Slavic writing, archives of outstanding world and Ukrainian scientists and cultural persons. The holdings include the collection of the Presidents of Ukraine, archive copies of Ukrainian printed documents from 1917, and archives of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Annually, the library receives 160.000-180.000 documents (books, magazines, newspapers, etc.). Holdings include all Ukrainian publications and copies of all Ukrainian candidate and doctoral theses. The library exchanges materials with more than 1.500 research and academic institutions and libraries from 80 countries. As a United Nations depository since 1964, the library receives all English and Russian language publications from the United Nations and its special institutions.

Materials may be searched through print and online library catalogs, card indexes, and reference databases. Materials from 1994 to present are included in the electronic card catalog. There are more than 30 department print card catalogs arranged by subject and classification.

Each year, about 500.000 readers use the library resources and receive 5 million documents. Each day, about 1.800-2.000 scientists, specialists, post-graduate students, and students visit the library. The readers are served in 16 specialized reading rooms of the main library complex, and 6 reading rooms at the branch site that houses collections of manuscripts, incunabula and rare books, prints and reproductions, music editions, Jewish manuscripts and printed editions, the largest newspaper collection in Ukraine, and the archives of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The library serves governmental bodies such as Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) of Ukraine, the President’s administration and Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. For these bodies, the library provides not only traditional library services, but also prepares reviews and analytical materials.

The library serves as a research institute in the fields of library science, bibliographical sciences, book sciences and information technologies. The library publishes the magazine Library News and annually hosts international scientific conferences.

The library has more than 700 computers in use for creating the National Electronic Library of Ukraine and to serve readers by providing electronic information resources.

The library has more than 40 departments, grouped by fields (such as library sciences, Ukrainian books, manuscripts, archived sciences, bibliographical research) and centers (such as preservation and restoration, culture and education, computer technologies, and publishing). The library has about 900 employees (70% librarians, 17% scientists, 13% auxiliary staff).