The Committee on Accreditation of the American Library Association defines library and information studies to be concerned with recordable information and knowledge and the services and technologies to facilitate their management and use. Library and information studies encompasses information and knowledge creation, communication, identification, selection, acquisition, organization and description, storage and retrieval, preservation, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, synthesis, dissemination, and management. The Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies endorses this definition. Librarianship as an organized profession has a long tradition. The remains of libraries have been excavated from the ruins of ancient Egypt and Assyria.
Academic libraries trace their lineage to late medieval times.
Even public libraries, which we think of as an outgrowth of the mid-nineteenth century, had their prototypes among the Romans. Special and corporate libraries are largely twentieth-century developments, as are school library media centers. The emergence of national libraries signals a country's intellectual coming of age. Libraries have served many essential purposes. Among the earliest is the acquisition and organization of records.