Library Reading Room

The nerve center of study is like a little chapel dedicated to the gods of graduate degrees. You occasionally poke your head up to peak around at the most recent passerby or to watch some attractive alumni with their head in a book. But mostly you sit and read, absorbing every bit of information, ready to regurgitate it at a moment's notice. Private or personal libraries made up of non-fiction and fiction books appeared in classical Greece in the 5th century BC. In the West, the first public libraries were established under the Roman Empire as each succeeding emperor strove to open one or many which outshone that of his predecessor. Unlike the Greek libraries, readers had direct access to the scrolls, which were kept on shelves built into the walls of a large room. Reading or copying was normally done in the room itself. The surviving records give only a few instances of lending features. As a rule, Roman public libraries were bilingual: they had a Latin room and a Greek room. The imperial library is the earliest known Chinese library, with history dating back to the Qin Dynasty. Han Chinese scholar Liu Hsiang established the first library classification system during the Han Dynasty, and the first book notation system. At this time the library catalog was written on scrolls of fine silk and stored in silk bags. By the 8th century first Iranians and then Arabs had imported the craft of papermaking from China, with a paper mill already at work in Baghdad in 794. By the 9th century completely public libraries started to appear in many Islamic cities. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=121870