Master for Webs

As this year's annual American Library Association convention gets underway in New Orleans, we thought it an appropriate time to re-open the books (quietly, of course) on how the library came by its name.

Library derives from liber, a Latin noun originally denoting the inner bark of a tree that was used as paper before the introduction of papyrus. Technology advanced and papyrus paper displaced the bark, but the word liber was retained to refer to "a sheet of papyrus used for writing." It eventually acquired two additional senses: "a book, volume, or long document" and "a division of a long literary work."

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