The library has existed for millennia--although it has not by any means existed in the same form or even always for the same purpose. It was not always a "public" institution, even though that term seems almost synonymous with the library today. Before the invention of the printing press, books were much rarer and much more valuable because of the enormous amount of time and energy that went into the creation of a single volume. Books were not available to the average person, but the "average" person during that point in history also could not read most of the time.
A colleague sent me this video on the Medieval helpdesk of a library. While there are a lot of historic inconsistensies, I found it a rather amusing video. I bet a vast number of librarians would be able to find some similarities between this exchange and many of their own!
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