Publication Date
10-1-2013
Abstract
Since their earliest days, libraries have struggled with meeting two opposing goals: preservation of materials and adequate user access to those same materials. Adequate user access to library materials includes physical access as well as providing a navigable system of organization that allows users to find needed materials. Although the privileging of access over preservation may seem like a modern concept, two seminal library treatises published a year apart in seventeenth-century France championed the issue of increased library access, especially by establishing usable organization in their respective collections: Gabriel Naudé’s Avis pour dresser une bibliothèque and Claude Clement’s Musei, sive Bibliothecae tam privatae quam publicae extructio, instructio, cura, usus…