Private professionals, not institutions, shaped libraries for two centuries

Evidence

For the next two hundred years, the fate of the library would lie in the hands of generations of scholars, civil servants, lawyers, physicians and merchants, who collected books for work, and increasingly for pleasure. This was the age of the professionals; and it was they who would shape the future of the library. — Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile History, 229

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s goal of tracing who drove library history across eras. — connects to: Private libraries functioned mainly as intellectual and financial assets, not display — Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile History, 46; Libraries arranged books by scholarly faculty until the eighteenth century — Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile History, 210
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile History, 229

Broader Connections

• Libraries arranged books by scholarly faculty until the eighteenth century #expands (0.70) — Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile History, 210