Scholars have depended on collections of written material in some form for millennia. While in the twenty-first century, more and more institutions refer to such collections as “Learning Commons” to reflect more accurately the availability of multiple media formats, institutions called libraries have a long history of acting as repositories not only of books but also of art, unbound documents, periodical literature, audio and video recordings, and other arti-facts. Libraries are and were also meeting places, both in the literal sense that they are shared spaces for those engaging in similar pursuits, and in the more metaphorical sense that they provide an opportunity for patrons to encounter and engage with representations of the wider world, in its variety of languages,customs, preferences, achievements, and so on. In short, libraries gather, pre -serve, exchange, and expand knowledge. They serve as storehouses of infor-mation (like archives), but also as creators of knowledge, both because of the roles their staffs have adopted in collecting, curating, and displaying their con-tents, and because at times they have refused or failed to collect or display certain items. They may be public, restricted, or private; they may be dedicated to a particular branch of knowledge or attempt to be encyclopedic.