The Mesopotamians were a people who wrote on wet clay tables a wedge-shaped stick called “a cuneus”, and their writing was known as “cuneiform”. Thousands of these tables were stored in palaces and temples and were arranged in subject order, have been found. Such palace collections were the first real libraries in the history of mankind. In ancient Egypt the libraries were placed in temples and were under supervision of priests. The most well-known library of ancient times was in Alexandria, founded in 300 B.C. It had 700,000 papyrus rolls and was completely catalogued and classified under 120 classes.

Julius Caesar first planned for a system of public libraries, and after him the public library was the Roman institution. In the fourth century twenty-eight public libraries were existed in the Rome. After beginning of the Christian era library was an essential part of a church. The universities of Paris, Heidelberg and Florence had the collections of chain books. In that time books were so difficult to make that to protect them they were chained. By 1400, the University of Oxford began to recognize its library which was called “the Bodleian”, it is still the biggest library in the world.

In 1850, the English parliament passed an act permitting the establishment of public libraries and they have grown and developed everywhere since that time.