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.