Early librarie
The first libraries consisted of archives of the earliest form of writing - the clay tablets in cuneiform script discovered in temple rooms in Sumer,[3][4] some dating back to 2600 BC.[5] These archives, which mainly consisted of the records of commercial transactions or inventories, mark the end of prehistory and the start of history.[6][7] Things were much the same in the government and temple records on papyrus of Ancient Egypt.[4] The earliest discovered private archives were kept at Ugarit; besides correspondence and inventories, texts of myths may have been standardized practice-texts for teaching new scribes. There is also evidence of libraries at Nippur about 1900 BC and those at Nineveh about 700 BC showing a library classification system.[8] Over 30,000 clay tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal have been discovered at Nineveh,[9] providing modern scholars with an amazing wealth of Mesopotamian literary, religious and administrative work. Among the findings were the Enuma Elish, also known as the Epic of Creation,[10] which depicts a traditional Babylonian view of creation, the Epic of Gilgamesh,[11] a large selection of "omen texts" including Enuma Anu Enlil which "contained omens dealing with the moon, its visibility, eclipses, and conjunction with planets and fixed stars, the sun, its corona, spots, and eclipses, the weather, namely lightning, thunder, and clouds, and the planets and their visibility, appearance, and stations",[12] and astronomic/astrological texts, as well as standard lists used by scribes and scholars such as word lists, bilingual vocabularies, lists of signs and synonyms, and lis s of medical diagnoses. Philosopher Laozi was keeper of books in the earliest library in China, which belonged to the Imperial Zhou dynasty.[13] Also, evidence of catalogues found in some destroyed ancient libraries illustrates the presence of librarians. An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located.[1] Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. As usually understood by professional archivists and historians, archives are records which have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative or social activities – they have been defined as "the secretions of an organism"[2] – rather than those which have been consciously written or created to communicate a particular message to posterity. In general, archives consist of records that have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation on grounds of their enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique, unlike books or magazines for which many identical copies exist. This means that archives (the places) are quite distinct from libraries with regard to their functions and organization, although archival collections can often be found within library buildings.[3] A person who works in archives is called an archivist. The study and practice of organizing, preserving, and providing access to information and materials in archives is called archival science.