Special Libraries - History

History

In their current status as a type of library independent from public, academic, and archival libraries, special libraries are a recent phenomenon, although it is difficult to determine when they began to be recognized as a distinct subset of libraries due to the highly individualistic and independent nature of most special libraries. Perhaps the closest date to assign to the beginnings of special libraries in the modern sense is 1909, the year that the Special Libraries Association, one of the oldest and largest library advocacy groups specifically concerned with special libraries, was founded. Describing the history of special libraries in the modern sense of the word is therefore difficult, as the only criteria for defining a special library is that it is a library – itself an often nebulous term – that is not a national, research, reference, public, academic, children’s, or archival library. As a result, one view of the history of modern special libraries is that it is what the history of other types of libraries do not include.

However, tracing the history of these types of groups before the modern definition of special libraries reveals that the concept of special libraries as libraries existing to support specific private interests or institutions in their goal is likely the oldest in existence. The first known libraries, dating back to the beginning of known history, recorded commercial transactions and inventories. Today, these fall under the heading of corporate libraries, discussed below. Likewise, a substantial number of the cuneiform tablets recovered from the Library of Ashurbanipal detail Babylonian religious beliefs and myths. Again, in a modern context, religious libraries are often considered special libraries.

Of course, early libraries are generally not considered to be special libraries in most contexts, but it is nevertheless clear that libraries today grouped under the label of special libraries long predate that label.