ABSTRACT
The centrepiece reading rooms of grand nineteenth-century national or metropolitan libraries typically house the modern institution’s keynote collection. The nineteenth century saw the development around the world of copyright deposit libraries that were legally charged with collecting a complete record of a nation’s print culture. National and state-based public libraries are key components of their respective countries’ research infrastructure, but they are flanked in this role by institutional libraries that are owned and operated by universities and other organisations of higher learning. Top-tier academic research libraries that have spent fortunes acquiring some of the world’s most prestigious books and manuscripts are understandably wary of lending them to other institutions and thus losing the patronage of visiting scholars who wish to consult rare items. Most libraries have abandoned microfilm, with all its operational clunkiness and technological instability, in favour of digitisation.
