Introduction

The creation of libraries to cater for specialist interests has a long history. As early as the mid-sixteenth century cathedrals received royal orders to start theological libraries. Access to specialised libraries was, indeed, a valuable aid to all the traditional professions – law and medicine, as well as the church. Thus, the Inns of Court had rudimentary libraries from early in their career, while the library of the Royal College of Physicians of London soon developed from an existing private collection. As knowledge expanded in subsequent centuries, so did the variety of professional interests. Hence arose the need for new types of specialised libraries. By the end of the eighteenth century, for example, the Foreign Office had recognised the need not only for a departmental library, but also for a librarian to manage it. Alongside professional developments, new intellectual interests led to the formation of societies devoted to specific subjects. Both the Royal Society in the seventeenth century and the Society of Antiquaries in the eighteenth century began to build collections soon after their foundation.

Although these two strands – the growth of professions and of organised interest in specific topics – therefore existed prior to the nineteenth century, it was during that century that they began to develop rapidly, and specialisation became the norm. Engineering, for example, came to be recognised not only as an important new profession, but as one that increasingly required its practitioners to specialise in one branch of the subject only. Consequently, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a range of new engineering societies (for gas engineers, mining engineers, and so on) were created to cater for these growing bands of specialists.