Types of Libraries

Libraries are sorted less by what they hold than by whom they serve and why they exist. A national library keeps a country’s published record whether or not anyone asks for it. A public library serves whoever lives nearby. A university library supports a curriculum. A hospital library answers narrow questions quickly. The same word covers all of them, which is why a short map is useful.

What follows groups libraries by purpose first, then by the way they reach their readers. Most real institutions sit in more than one group at once.

Public libraries

The type most readers mean by the word. Funded by a municipality, a region or the state, open to residents without charge, and organised around lending and access rather than preservation. A public library balances popular demand with reference material, runs children’s and community programmes, and increasingly acts as general public space. Its collection is chosen for use, and material that stops being borrowed is usually withdrawn to make room.

Branch networks are the normal arrangement: a central library with a deeper collection, and smaller branches close to where people live. The Modern Library describes what these buildings now do beyond lending.

National libraries

One per country, as a rule. A national library’s job is memory: to collect and keep what is published in or about the country, usually through legal deposit, which obliges publishers to send a copy of everything they issue. That makes the collection comprehensive rather than selective, and permanent rather than circulating. Most do not lend at all; you consult material on site.

National libraries also tend to run the country’s bibliographic infrastructure, assigning identifiers and publishing the authoritative catalogue records other libraries reuse.

Academic and research libraries

University and college libraries exist to support teaching and research. Their collections follow the courses and the departments, heavy on journals, databases and reference works, and they invest in teaching students how to search rather than only in what to read. Access is normally tied to enrolment, though many allow visitors to read on site.

Research libraries and learned institutes go further in one direction: deep collections in a defined field, often including archives, manuscripts and material held nowhere else. They serve a small number of readers intensively.

Special libraries

A special library serves an organisation rather than a public. Law firms, hospitals, museums, parliaments, government departments, newspapers, companies and religious institutions all run them. The collection is narrow, current and expensive, and the librarian’s main output is answers rather than loans: a summary, a search result, a verified figure delivered under time pressure.

Children’s and school libraries

School libraries combine a collection with teaching, and are the place where most people meet a catalogue for the first time. Children’s libraries, whether separate institutions or a department of a public library, are designed around a different reader: shorter attention, adult company, noise as an acceptable condition, and a collection graded by reading level. They are also where reading habits are formed, which is the subject of Reading & Culture.

Digital libraries

A library with no address. Its collection is digitized or born-digital material, described and made searchable, and its readers arrive from anywhere. Some digital libraries are independent projects; many are the online half of a physical institution. The working parts, selection, digitization, metadata and preservation, are set out in What Is a Digital Library?.

Mobile libraries and bookmobiles

Where readers cannot easily reach a library, the library travels. A bookmobile is a van, bus or lorry fitted with shelving that follows a published timetable of stops in villages, housing estates, schools and care homes. In some regions the vehicle is a boat, a train carriage or a pack animal. The collection is small and rotated, and the service is often the only one available to readers with limited mobility or transport.

Micro libraries and book exchanges

At the smallest end sit unstaffed collections a few dozen volumes deep: a converted telephone box, a cabinet on a post, a shelf in a station, a café or a laundrette. There is no catalogue and usually no rule beyond take one, leave one. They are not substitutes for a library service, but they put books where people already walk, and they are cheap enough for a street to build one.

Prison, hospital and outreach libraries

Some libraries exist because their readers cannot come to any other. Prison libraries provide reading, legal reference and study material inside an institution, and are often the main route to education there. Hospital libraries serve patients and, separately, clinical staff. Housebound and care-home delivery services bring selected books to readers at home. All three work under constraints that shape the collection heavily.

Private and subscription libraries

Before public provision, reading for most people meant paying. Subscription libraries, some still operating, lend to members who pay an annual fee, and often hold collections that no public body would have kept. Private libraries, from a scholar’s working shelves to a country-house collection, are a different thing again: assembled by one owner, and interesting to researchers precisely because the choices were personal.

Libraries of things, tool libraries, seed libraries

The lending principle applies to anything used occasionally. A library of things lends household and hobby equipment: drills, sewing machines, projectors, camping gear, cake tins, measuring instruments. A tool library specialises in that direction. A seed library lends or shares seed, with the expectation that borrowers return seed from what they grow, which makes it a conservation project as much as a lending one.

Many of these run inside public libraries, using the same membership, the same counter and the same overdue rules. They are the clearest sign that a library is defined by an arrangement rather than by a format.

How the types blur

The boundaries have never been tidy and are getting less so. A public library may hold a legal deposit collection, a national library runs one of the largest digital libraries in its country, a university library opens its reading room to the town. Rather than filing a library under one label, it is more useful to ask which purpose is driving its decisions, and to look at particular examples in Libraries of the World.