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Although collecting new materials is viewed as a central mission of the library, maintaining the condition of library collections, which includes less satisfactory activities such as weeding, book repair, shifting and counting what libraries think they have on their shelves, are also a vital part of the library's mission to provide access to current patrons, as well as those people who will ...
While libraries contain individual items, such as books and journals, of which multiple, identical copies exist, archives contain records that are both unique and interrelated. [10] Archives represent the activities of a person, family or organization that are created and accumulated naturally in the course of their ordinary activities. [10]
Libraries encourage code reuse in a modular fashion. When writing code that uses a library, a programmer only needs to know high-level information such as what items it contains and how to use the items – not all of the internal details of the library. Libraries can use other libraries resulting in a hierarchy of libraries in a program.
In her book Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship, Nancy Kalikow Maxwell discusses how libraries are capable of performing some of the same functions as religion. [71] Many librarians feel that their work is done for some higher purpose. [71] The same can be said for preservation librarians.
Archives in the modern world, while of more recent date, may also hold material going back several centuries, for example, the United States National Archives and Records Administration was established originally in 1934. [3] The NARA contains records and collections dating back to the founding of the United States in the 18th century.
Guinness World Records, known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as The Guinness Book of Records and in previous United States editions as The Guinness Book of World Records, is a British reference book published annually, listing world records both of human achievements and the extremes of the natural world.
In 2002, the Library of Congress developed the MARCXML schema as an alternative record structure, allowing MARC records to be represented in XML; the fields remain the same, but those fields are expressed in the record in XML markup. Libraries typically expose their records as MARCXML via a web service, often following the SRU or OAI-PMH standards.
In the UK, the National Archives (formerly known as the Public Record Office) is the government archive for England and Wales. The physical records stored by the National Archives amount to 185 km (115 miles) of shelving, a number that increases every year. [40] The English Heritage Archive is the public archive of English Heritage.