Depository Libraries

A Brief History

The basis of book classification as a science is inextricably linked to our social patterns and our habits as evolutionary beings. It has come out of our evolving definitions of knowledge and rights to knowledge, which have been shaped by revolutions in book history.

The Printing Revolution

The advent of printing, made possible by Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press, radically changed the way in which we think about the book and knowledge. Since the seventeenth century, much after the Gutenberg press was invented, bibliographia had come to mean the knowledge of books, notably in a classificatory sense; that is, the process centered on lists, called bibliothecae (libraries).(Johns 231) With the boom of printing in the eighteenth century, the new question posed was how to organize, classify, and represent the world of printed knowledge.

The French Revolution

Alongside the printing revolution, the French Revolution was pivotal in shifting bibliography towards a classificatory science of the book, rather than of knowledge. That is to say, focus turned to typography, binding, and paper to create a new, systematic science of the book.(Johns 231) Concerning France’s first national library, Bibliothèque Mazarine, upheaval during the French Revolution threatened partial or total destruction.(Varry) In response, private libraries of aristocrats and clergy were seized, resulting in the dispersal of many collections and, therefore, a need to specify the details of particular volumes closely and systematically.(Johns 231) Thus, we were given the organizational and ideological basis for national deposit libraries charged with the scientific classification of the book.

Legal Deposit and Copyright

The emphasis on the processes of collection and a systematic categorization of books contributed to the careful tracking and precise recording of printed content. The Statute of Anne, which is the basis for copyright law, predates the modern format for depository libraries; however, the systematic categorization made way for centralized copyright protection. Legal deposit is the requirement that a person or group submit copies of a publication to a repository, and so depository libraries became the sites for recording. In the United States, publishers are required to submit two copies of a copyrightable work to the Library of Congress in what is known as mandatory deposit. This is an important basis for understanding the function, in both a cultural and utilitarian sense, of depository libraries that mediate book classification and book knowledge.