What is "library"

Library \Li"bra*ry\ (l[imac]"br[asl]*r[y^]), n.; pl. Libraries (-r[i^]z). [OE. librairie, F. librairie bookseller's shop, book trade, formerly, a library, fr. libraire bookseller, L. librarius, from liber book; cf. libraria bookseller's shop, librarium bookcase, It. libreria. See Libel.]

1. A considerable collection of books kept for use, and not as merchandise; as, a private library; a public library.

2. A building or apartment appropriated for holding such a collection of books.
   --Holland.

place for books, late 14c., from Anglo-French librarie, Old French librairie "collection of books" (14c.), noun use of adj. librarius "concerning books," from Latin librarium "chest for books," from liber (genitive libri) "book, paper, parchment," originally "the inner bark of trees," probably a derivative of PIE root *leub(h)- "to strip, to peel" (see leaf). The equivalent word in most Romance languages now means "bookseller's shop." Old English had bochord, literally "book hord."

n. 1 An institution which holds books and/or other forms of stored information for use by the public or qualified people. It is usual, but not a defining feature of a library, for it to be housed in rooms of a building, to lend items of its collection to members either with or without payment, and to provide various other services for its community of users. 2 A collection of books or other forms of stored information. 3 An equivalent collection of analogous information in a non-printed form, e.g. record library 4 (context computer science English) A collection of software subprograms that provides functionality, to be incorporated into or used by a computer program. 5 (context card games English) The deck or draw pile

1. n. a room where books are kept; "they had brandy in the library"

2. a collection of literary documents or records kept for reference or borrowing

3. a depository built to contain books and other materials for reading and study [syn: depository library]

4. (computing) a collection of standard programs and subroutines that are stored and available for immediate use [syn: program library, subroutine library]

5. a building that houses a collection of books and other materials

In molecular biology, a library is a collection of DNA fragments that is stored and propagated in a population of micro-organisms through the process of molecular cloning. There are different types of DNA libraries, including cDNA libraries (formed from reverse-transcribed RNA), genomic libraries (formed from genomic DNA) and randomized mutant libraries (formed by de novo gene synthesis where alternative nucleotides or codons are incorporated). DNA library technology is a mainstay of current molecular biology, and the applications of these libraries depends on the source of the original DNA fragments. There are differences in the cloning vectors and techniques used in library preparation, but in general each DNA fragment is uniquely inserted into a cloning vector and the pool of recombinant DNA molecules is then transferred into a population of bacteria (a Bacterial Artificial Chromosome or BAC library) or yeast such that each organism contains on average one construct (vector + insert). As the population of organisms is grown in culture, the DNA molecules contained within them are copied and propagated (thus, "cloned").

The White House Library is on the Ground Floor of the White House, the official home of the President of the United States. The room is approximately and is in the northeast of the ground floor. The Library is used for teas and meetings hosted by the President and First Lady. During the 1950s reconstruction of the White House, old building lumber from the house was salvaged and re-made into wall paneling for this room. Several basement rooms in the White House are paneled with salvaged building materials from the pre-reconstructed White House.

Library may refer to:

• Library, a collection of books or an institution lending books and providing information
• Library (computing), a collection of subprograms used to develop software
  • Runtime library
• Features new to Windows 7#Libraries, virtual folders that aggregate content from various locations
• Library (electronics), a collection of cells, macros or functional units that perform common operations
• Library (biology), a collection of molecules in a stable form that represents some aspect of an organism
• Library Records, a record label
• Library (UTA station), a transit station in Salt Lake City
• Library, PA, an unincorporated community in southwest Pennsylvania
• Library (PAT station), a station on the Port Authority of Allegheny County's light rail network

Library is a station on the Port Authority of Allegheny County's light rail network, located in the Library neighborhood of South Park, Pennsylvania. It is the southern terminus of the Library branch of the Blue Line. A 430 space park and ride lot is located on the premises, drawing travelers from both South Park and Pittsburgh's suburbs in Washington County, located just to the south. Despite the station's name there is no lending library near the train station, in the past many riders have been confused into thinking there was an actual library there.

Library was a literary magazine founded in the United States in 1900.

Library is a light rail station in Downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, United States serviced by the Red Line of the Utah Transit Authority's (UTA) TRAX light rail system. The Red Line provides service from the University of Utah to the Daybreak Community of South Jordan.

A library is a collection of sources of information and similar resources, made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing. It provides physical or digital access to material, and may be a physical building or room, or a virtual space, or both. A library's collection can include books, periodicals, newspapers, manuscripts, films, maps, prints, documents, microform, CDs, cassettes, videotapes, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, e-books, audiobooks, databases, and other formats. Libraries range in size from a few shelves of books to several million items. In Latin and Greek, the idea of bookcase is represented by Bibliotheca and Bibliothēkē (Greek: βιβλιοθήκη): derivatives of these mean library in many modern languages, e.g. French bibliothèque.

The first libraries consisted of archives of the earliest form of writing—the clay tablets in cuneiform script discovered in Sumer, some dating back to 2600 BC. Private or personal libraries made up of written books appeared in classical Greece in the 5th century BC. In the 6th century, at the very close of the Classical period, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world remained those of Constantinople and Alexandria.

A library is organized for use and maintained by a public body, an institution, a corporation, or a private individual. Public and institutional collections and services may be intended for use by people who choose not to—or cannot afford to—purchase an extensive collection themselves, who need material no individual can reasonably be expected to have, or who require professional assistance with their research. In addition to providing materials, libraries also provide the services of librarians who are experts at finding and organizing information and at interpreting information needs. Libraries often provide quiet areas for studying, and they also often offer common areas to facilitate group study and collaboration. Libraries often provide public facilities for access to their electronic resources and the Internet. Modern libraries are increasingly being redefined as places to get unrestricted access to information in many formats and from many sources. They are extending services beyond the physical walls of a building, by providing material accessible by electronic means, and by providing the assistance of librarians in navigating and analyzing very large amounts of information with a variety of digital tools.

In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often to develop software. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subroutines, classes, values or type specifications. In IBM's OS/360 and its successors they are referred to as partitioned data sets.

In computer science, a library is a collection of implementations of behavior, written in terms of a language, that has a well-defined interface by which the behavior is invoked. This means that as long as a higher level program uses a library to make system calls, it does not need to be re-written to implement those system calls over and over again. In addition, the behavior is provided for reuse by multiple independent programs. A program invokes the library-provided behavior via a mechanism of the language. For example, in a simple imperative language such as C, the behavior in a library is invoked by using C's normal function-call. What distinguishes the call as being to a library, versus being to another function in the same program, is the way that the code is organized in the system.

Library code is organized in such a way that it can be used by multiple programs that have no connection to each other, while code that is part of a program is organized to only be used within that one program. This distinction can gain a hierarchical notion when a program grows large, such as a multi-million-line program. In that case, there may be internal libraries that are reused by independent sub-portions of the large program. The distinguishing feature is that a library is organized for the purposes of being reused by independent programs or sub-programs, and the user only needs to know the interface, and not the internal details of the library.

The value of a library is the reuse of the behavior. When a program invokes a library, it gains the behavior implemented inside that library without having to implement that behavior itself. Libraries encourage the sharing of code in a modular fashion, and ease the distribution of the code.

The behavior implemented by a library can be connected to the invoking program at different program lifecycle phases. If the code of the library is accessed during the build of the invoking program, then the library is called a static library. An alternative is to build the executable of the invoking program and distribute that, independently from the library implementation. The library behavior is connected after the executable has been invoked to be executed, either as part of the process of starting the execution, or in the middle of execution. In this case the library is called a dynamic library (loaded at run time). A dynamic library can be loaded and linked as part of preparing a program for execution, by the linker. Alternatively, in the middle of execution, an application may explicitly request that a module be loaded.

Most compiled languages have a standard library although programmers can also create their own custom libraries. Most modern software systems provide libraries that implement the majority of system services. Such libraries have commoditized the services which a modern application requires. As such, most code used by modern applications is provided in these system libraries.