Early libraries guilty of less selection, access

News-Miner - Past News: In honor of National Library Week Greg Hill, director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries in Alaska, writes an interesting article on the history of the nature of libraries. Here's an excerpt:
"The first libraries, which date back to 3000 B.C. were more like files, containing letters, lists, inventories and other documents that were of bureaucratic and administrative importance. Around 2500 B.C., books began appearing that described rituals and incantations, and others that were handbooks for all sorts of temporal and secular scribal activities.
These 'consulting collections' were used by the scribes, the first librarians, and the collections included lists of gods, professions and geographic place names, text of hymns and writing exercises. Eventually, religious stories, which today we think of as myths and legends, began to be written in clay."