"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need" (Marcus Tullius Cicero). "And search in the library where the treasures are stored in Babylon" (Ezra 6:1).
In the era we live in, it's easy to find knowledge. Knowledge is accessible and calls to us from various sources: the home internet, textbooks in schools and universities, professional databases in workplaces. Even in the leisure domain - nowadays, it's rare to find a café that doesn't respect itself with a bookshelf for the perusal and enjoyment of its diners. For us, who enjoy this abundance to the point where it's often taken for granted, it's hard to imagine that things weren't always this way and that in the past, knowledge was considered the property of the chosen few - princes, clerics, and rulers. And perhaps it was this that supported and defined their coveted status in the eyes of the rest of the people.
Libraries are the first tools invented by humans to preserve the knowledge accumulated over the years and to allow their users to access this knowledge efficiently. The cataloging and information management methods invented for them and used in them for thousands of years serve us even today in their more accessible and modern versions of libraries - portals, websites, and electronic knowledge management repositories. Today, in the era of knowledge accessibility, some libraries, whether stationary or online, serve the public, aiming to expand the knowledge of the public. In contrast, others are intended for researchers and professionals who need professional information.
The first libraries were established about 4000 years ago and mainly adorned palaces and temples. These libraries resembled archives, which mostly hold rare, original documents, not copies, that cannot be obtained elsewhere. It's understandable, then, that the knowledge contained in such a library was limited. In addition, these information centers were limited in their usage possibilities and mainly served kings and the chain of government.
In the 7th century BCE, the king of Assyria established a library in his palace in the city of Nineveh open to many scholars from all corners of his kingdom, not just the chain of government. In the library, users were exposed to many works in legends, laws, science, and war, collected from the lands of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon. And on what platform was this coveted knowledge managed? Not in Plumtree, MOSS, or Websphere systems! The king of Assyria offered scholars two rooms full of thousands of clay tablets and scrolls and clay tablets written in cuneiform script.
This was an innovative and brave act! By making knowledge available to entities other than the ruling entity, a situation could have arisen where additional entities claim the right to rule, thanks to the knowledge they accumulated that allows them skills similar to those of the king. This situation indeed occurred hundreds of years later. An important place is therefore reserved for the king of Assyria in the history of making knowledge available to the masses and thus also in raising the rule of the people.
The ancient era is prosperous in famous libraries. The uniqueness of this period was the emphasis on accumulating knowledge and making it easily accessible to the user. In this context, we'll mention the Library of Ptolemy II in Alexandria and the Imperial Library in China. In the Library of Alexandria, an orderly and consistent effort was made to collect most of the written culture of those days - this included translation work to make knowledge accessible to new user populations. The Imperial Library was the first to develop a method for classifying and marking books. It is a breakthrough in cataloging and classification that still serves us today - giving values and characteristics to knowledge items to facilitate retrieval.
In the Middle Ages in Europe, there was a decline in literacy levels, and most of the population could not read or write. Books were limited to royal houses, monasteries, universities, and part of the nobility. Access to these writings was minimal. The first public libraries in the complete sense of the word (a library funded by the public and open to the public) were established in the United States - in New Hampshire in 1833 and in Boston in 1848.
However, the significant breakthrough in making knowledge accessible to all occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie funded the establishment of about 2,500 public libraries in small towns across the United States. The significance was that knowledge became the property not only of the inhabitants of big cities but also of people scattered throughout the continent - people who sometimes did not visit the big city more than a few times and thus could not be exposed to the knowledge existing there. Think about what a revolution has taken place over the years! - from the limited information available only to princes and emperors to the knowledge available to the "ordinary" people among us - farmers and peasants, blue-collar workers, and factory workers.
Carnegie was involved not only in funding libraries but also in designing them to facilitate finding relevant knowledge and provide an emotionally encouraging and learning-supportive environment. In other words, Carnegie laid the foundations for the field we now call user interface.
Although gender segregation was practiced in public buildings then, in Carnegie libraries, men and women were allowed to enter each room. In addition, Carnegie libraries were among the first to enable visitors to choose books from the shelves themselves instead of requesting them from librarians. In this way, high accessibility to knowledge was created, the possibility of comparing different knowledge items, and the exercise of reader discretion.
Carnegie insisted on a classic style and symmetrical design. Some historians argue that Carnegie libraries were simple in appearance, but this is true only in comparison to more sophisticated libraries in big cities like New York and Chicago, which had carved decorations, ornate ceilings, and crystal chandeliers. Compared to a local woman's living room or a shop window on Main Street, the local libraries in small towns were considered beautiful, with high ceilings and huge windows. The library environment conveyed a sense of size and power, emphasizing the empowerment and strength inherent in its knowledge. The large windows allowed light to enter and contributed to a sense of well-being that facilitates learning and comfortable physical conditions for reading. Carnegie's library was where books were visible, but no sound was heard. It was a temple of learning.
A children's library was located on the lower level, which was slightly lower than the entrance floor - a real innovation in a time when children were often confined to their homes. Children could sit and read on a round bench, with a window at the entrance floor overlooking a lawn. The floorboards in the building creaked to the touch of a foot, and often, these creaks were the only sound heard in the library. It seemed as if Carnegie libraries were designed so children would feel they could disappear in them and not be found - and that it would be fantastic.
And see where we are today regarding children's libraries - human beings are exposed to knowledge from a young age at a level that could not even be dreamed of in the past. In addition, the physical conditions of broad storage surfaces, comfortable reading armchairs, computers available to all, story hours where books are read to young children, and extended operating hours provide everyone with initial knowledge that empowers their cognitive and emotional development as a person.
And today? Today, knowledge has become so accessible that we often take it for granted. Remember, then, that an organization committed to a portal establishment project is doing an inconceivable act for its employees in the historical sense. Remember that in the past, professional knowledge was reserved for the very few who guarded it like the apple of their eye - lest it become available to others. Understand how lucky we are to have the opportunity to choose the knowledge we are exposed to, and it is not selected for us by a third party. We live in a beautiful time!
[Background for the article]: Dewey, by Vicki Myron, published by Matar Library.
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