Library
For other uses, see Library (disambiguation). Library at Melk Abbey in Austria The Halifax Central Library, a modern city library A library is a collection of sources of information and similar resources, made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing. [1] It provides physical or digital access to material, and may be a physical building or room, or a virtual space, or both. [2] A library's collection can include books, periodicals, newspapers, manuscripts, films, maps, prints, documents, microform, CDs, cassettes, videotapes, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, e-books, audiobooks, databases, and other formats. Libraries range in size from a few shelves of books to several million items. In Latin and Greek, the idea of a bookcase is represented by Bibliotheca and Bibliothēkē (Greek: βιβλιοθήκη): derivatives of these mean library in many modern languages, e.g. French bibliothèque . The first libraries consisted of archives of the earliest form of writing—...