library. F. L. librar-ium, concerned with or employed about books, f. libr-, liber book, believed to be a use of liber, bark, the bark of trees, having, according to Roman tradition, been used in early times as a writing material.

A place set apart to contain books for reading, study, or reference

Applied to a room in a house.

A building, room, or set of rooms, containing a collection of books for the use of the public or some particular portion of it, or of the members of some society or the like; a public institution or establishment, charged with the care of a collection of books, and the duty of rendering the books accessible to those who require to use them.

A private commercial establishment for the lending of books . . .

A theatre ticket agency.

a) The books contained in a 'library' (sense 1): a large collection of books, public or private.

b) A series or set of books uniform or similar in external in appearance and ostensibly suited to some particular class of readers

c) i. A great mass of learning or knowledge. ii. the objects of a person's study, the sources on which he depends for instruction.

A collection of films, gramophone records, music, etc.

3. Computers. An organized collection of routines, esp. of tested routines suitable for a particular model of computer.

Oxford English Dictionary (1989) (slightly adapted).

Defining the Library II

"The object of the library is to bring together human beings and recorded knowledge in as fruitful a relationship as is humanly possible."

Jesse Shera, Sociological Foundations of Librarianship (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1970) p. 30

" Libraries exist to acquire, give access to, and safeguard carriers of knowledge and information in all forms and to provide instruction and assistance in the use of the collections to which their users have access. In short, libraries exist to give meaning to the continuing human attempt to transcend space and time in the advancement of knowledge and the preservation of culture."

Walt Crawford and Michael Gorman, Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness and Reality (Chicago: American Library association, 1995) 3.

" . . . the ways in which men and women collected and organized the records of human experience."

Fred Lerner, The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age (NY: Continuum, 1998, 11)