ABSTRACT
Writing makes social, cultural, and cognitive capital available for posterity. To this end, institutions such as archives and libraries have developed to collect, organize, and make synopses of knowledge. The earliest archives or libraries were affiliated with a palace, temple, or some kind of learning institution. State-funded public libraries, open to a general public, appeared later when widespread citizen education became an issue of national interest. This chapter takes a look at how different forms of collecting and organizing written knowledge historically have been carried out.
