ABSTRACT
Historically, universities have helped define and give form to
the library as a distinctive building type. The demands of education, particularly in the eighteenth century, led to the construction of a new generation of efficiently planned, rationally organized libraries. It was during this time that
the library matured into a recognizable building within the taxonomy of types. The library ceased to be a wing of a bigger building and became a structure with meanings all
of its own. Education demanded of libraries the same rigour and intellectual discipline that was displayed in the laboratories and lecture theatres of Europe’s expanding uni-
versities. Well before the public library had emerged on the scene (mostly from 1840 onwards), the university library had evolved with its own distinctive shape and form of spatial organization.
