This Month, 373 Years Ago

Beginning of article

LIBRARIANS IN WESTERN EUROPE were beginning to read Gabriel Naude's recently issued Avis pour dresser une bibliotheque (Advice on Establishing a Library). Although Advice did not constitute the earliest work attempting to outline librarianship's responsibilities (we'd probably have to go all the way back to the 3rd century B.C. Alexandrian Library (see p. 70) for that), it did address a lot of issues we now hold dear in our professional value system.

For example, Naude argued that 17th-century librarians not only needed to collect standard works, best authors, and earliest treatises on subjects (today we would call them "first editions"), but they also had responsibility for …