Question: When monastic libraries were destoryed, what was lost?
About the article "Dissolution of the Monasteries", section "Arts and culture".

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The earliest examples come from Egypt.
Monasteries under the direction of Pachomius (4th century) and Shenouda (5th century) required that members learn to read, and it was further expected that they would borrow and study texts from the community’s collection.
(Twentieth-century archeological discoveries—Phobaimmon and Nag Hammadi, for example–-have indicated that there was a tremendous amount of activity in writing and copying texts, and one library “catalog” from the period lists eighty titles.)
Collections were composed of biblical texts, lectionaries, church canons, hagiography/biography, etc.
In Eastern Christendom, monastic libraries developed on a similar pattern.
“Catalogs” were simply inventories of items held by the community.
On those rare occasions when a community's benefactor would give donate a personal collection, the tendency was not to dispose of questionable or even heretical works: given the short supply of texts, almost any item would be considered a “rare book.” The common practice in monastic life was for the abbot (or equivalent) to be charged with the responsibility for securing and caring for the collection.
It is from southern Italy that we receive the most enduring image of early Christian (and monastic) libraries and librarianship, in the person of Cassiodorus.
Like no one else of his time, he leaves us a compendious work of bibliography, the Institituiones divinarum et saecularum litterarum, which surveys first Christian and then secular texts, providing notes and commentary along the way.
An earlier attempt at Rome to establish a theological school had been frustrated, and so on his family’s estate at Calabria he established the “Vivarium”, as a setting in which “to incorporate systematic theological study into monastic life.” (Gamble, 1990) With this in view he assembled a large library of both Christian and Classical texts and designed a curriculum of study.
He undertook his monastic and bibliographic work only after a long and well-rewarded career in the service of the Goths, and hence the work we remember him for can be seen as aspiring “to combat the growing chaos of the world” (Southern, “ Benedictine,” 167).
We learn from the Institutiones how he had these sub-collections housed, what they included, together with how they were obtained. 
During the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England (1536–1541), many monastic libraries were destroyed.
Worcester Abbey had 600 books at the time of the dissolution.
Only six of them have survived intact to the present day.
At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three surviving books.
Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload, including irreplaceable early English works.
It is believed that many of the earliest Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were lost at this time.
: "A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous mansyons, resrved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes as toilet paper, some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes.
Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers…" — John Bale, 1549  
During the Late Antiquity and Middle Ages periods, there was no Rome of the kind that ruled the Mediterranean for centuries and spawned the culture that produced twenty-eight public libraries in the "urbs Roma".
The empire had been divided then later re-united again under Constantine the Great who moved the capital of the Roman Empire in 330 AD to the city of Byzantium which was renamed Constantinople.
The Roman intellectual culture that flourished in ancient times was undergoing a transformation as the academic world moved from laymen to Christian clergy.
As the West crumbled, books and libraries flourished and flowed east toward the Byzantine Empire.
There, four different types of libraries were established: imperial, patriarchal, monastic, and private.
Each had it own purpose and, as a result, their survival varied.
Christianity was a new force in Europe and many of the faithful saw Hellenistic culture as pagan.
As such, many classical Greek works, written on scrolls, were left to decay as only Christian texts were thought fit for preservation in a codex, the progenitor of the modern book.
In the East, however, this was not the case as many of these classical Greek and Roman texts were copied.
In Byzantium, much of this work devoted to preserving Hellenistic thought in codex form was performed in scriptoriums by monks.
While monastic library scriptoriums flourished throughout the East and West, the rules governing them were generally the same Barren and sun-lit rooms (because candles were a source of fire) were major features of the scriptorium that was both a model of production and monastic piety.
Monks scribbled away for hours a day, interrupted only by meals and prayers.
With such production, medieval monasteries began to accumulate large libraries.
These libraries were devoted solely to the education of the monks and were seen as essential to their spiritual development.
Although most of these texts that were produced were Christian in nature, many monastic leaders saw common virtues in the Greek classics.
As a result, many of these Greek works were copied, and thus saved, in monastic scriptoriums.
When Europe passed into the Dark Ages, Byzantine scriptoriums laboriously preserved Greco-Roman classics.
As a result, Byzantium revived Classical models of education and libraries.
The Imperial Library of Constantinople was an important depository of ancient knowledge.
Constantine himself wanted such a library but his short rule denied him the ability to see his vision to fruition.
His son Constantius II made this dream a reality and created an imperial library in a portico of the royal palace.
He ruled for 24 years and accelerated the development of the library and the intellectual culture that came with such a vast accumulation of books.
Constantius II appointed Themistius, a pagan philosopher and teacher, as chief architect of this library building program.
Themistius set about a bold program to create an imperial public library that would be the centerpiece of the new intellectual capital of Constantinople.
Classical authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Thucydides, Homer, and Zeno were sought.
Themeistius hired calligraphers and craftsman to produce the actual codices.
He also appointed educators and created a university-like school centered around the library.
After the death of Constantius II, Julian the Apostate, a bibliophile intellectual, ruled briefly for less than three years.
Despite this, he had a profound impact on the imperial library and sought both Christian and pagan books for its collections.
Later, the Emperor Valens hired Greek and Latin scribes full-time with from the royal treasury to copy and repair manuscripts.
At its height in the 5th century, the Imperial Library of Constantinople had 120,000 volumes and was the largest library in Europe.
A fire in 477 consumed the entire library but it was rebuilt only to be burned again in 726, 1204, and in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks.
Patriarchal libraries fared no better, and sometimes worse, than the Imperial Library.
The Library of the Patriarchate of Constantinople was founded most likely during the reign of Constantine the Great in the 4th century.
As a theological library, it was known to have employed a library classification system.
It also served as a repository of several ecumenical councils such as the Council of Nicea, Council of Ephesus, and the Council of Chalcedon.
The library, which employed a librarian and assistants, may have been originally located in the Patriarch’s official residence before it was moved to the Thomaites Triclinus in the 7th century.
While much is not known about the actual library itself, it is known that many of its contents were subject to destruction as religious in-fighting ultimately resulted in book burnings.
During this period, small private libraries existed.
Many of these were owned by church members and the aristocracy.
Teachers also were known to have small personal libraries as well as wealthy bibliophiles who could afford the highly ornate books of the period.
Thus, in the 6th century, at the close of the Classical period, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world remained those of Constantinople and Alexandria.
Cassiodorus, minister to Theodoric, established a monastery at Vivarium in the toe of Italy (modern Calabria) with a library where he attempted to bring Greek learning to Latin readers and preserve texts both sacred and secular for future generations.
As its unofficial librarian, Cassiodorus not only collected as many manuscripts as he could, he also wrote treatises aimed at instructing his monks in the proper uses of reading and methods for copying texts accurately.
In the end, however, the library at Vivarium was dispersed and lost within a century.
Through Origen and especially the scholarly presbyter Pamphilus of Caesarea, an avid collector of books of Scripture, the theological school of Caesarea won a reputation for having the most extensive ecclesiastical library of the time, containing more than 30,000 manuscripts: Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Jerome and others came and studied there.
By the 8th century first Iranians and then Arabs had imported the craft of papermaking from China, with a paper mill already at work in Baghdad in 794.
By the 9th century public libraries started to appear in many Islamic cities.
They were called "halls of Science" or "dar al-'ilm".
They were each endowed by Islamic sects with the purpose of representing their tenets as well as promoting the dissemination of secular knowledge.
The 9th-century Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil of Iraq, ordered the construction of a "zawiyat qurra" – an enclosure for readers which was "lavishly furnished and equipped".
In Shiraz Adhud al-Daula (d. 983) set up a library, described by the medieval historian, al-Muqaddasi, as "a complex of buildings surrounded by gardens with lakes and waterways.
The buildings were topped with domes, and comprised an upper and a lower story with a total, according to the chief official, of 360 rooms...
In each department, catalogues were placed on a shelf... the rooms were furnished with carpets".
The libraries often employed translators and copyists in large numbers, in order to render into Arabic the bulk of the available Persian, Greek, Roman and Sanskrit non-fiction and the classics of literature.
This flowering of Islamic learning ceased centuries later when learning began declining in the Islamic world, after many of these libraries were destroyed by Mongol invasions.
Others were victim of wars and religious strife in the Islamic world.
However, a few examples of these medieval libraries, such as the libraries of Chinguetti in West Africa, remain intact and relatively unchanged.
Another ancient library from this period which is still operational and expanding is the Central Library of Astan Quds Razavi in the Iranian city of Mashhad, which has been operating for more than six centuries.
The contents of these Islamic libraries were copied by Christian monks in Muslim/Christian border areas, particularly Spain and Sicily.
From there they eventually made their way into other parts of Christian Europe.
These copies joined works that had been preserved directly by Christian monks from Greek and Roman originals, as well as copies Western Christian monks made of Byzantine works.
The resulting conglomerate libraries are the basis of every modern library today.
Buddhist scriptures, educational materials, and histories were stored in libraries in pre-modern Southeast Asia.
In Burma, a royal library called the Pitaka Taik was legendarily founded by King Anawrahta; in the 18th century, British envoy Michael Symes, on visiting this library, wrote that "it is not improbable that his Birman majesty may possess a more numerous library than any potentate, from the banks of the Danube to the borders of China".
In Thailand libraries called ho trai were built throughout the country, usually on stilts above a pond to prevent bugs from eating at the books.
In the Early Middle Ages, monastery libraries developed, such as the important one at the Abbey of Montecassino in Italy.
Books were usually chained to the shelves, reflecting the fact that manuscripts, which were created via the labour-intensive process of hand copying, were valuable possessions.
Despite this protectiveness, many libraries loaned books if provided with security deposits (usually money or a book of equal value).
Lending was a means by which books could be copied and spread.
In 1212 the council of Paris condemned those monasteries that still forbade loaning books, reminding them that lending is "one of the chief works of mercy."
The early libraries located in monastic cloisters and associated with scriptoria were collections of lecterns with books chained to them.
Shelves built above and between back-to-back lecterns were the beginning of bookpresses.
The chain was attached at the fore-edge of a book rather than to its spine.
Book presses came to be arranged in carrels (perpendicular to the walls and therefore to the windows) in order to maximize lighting, with low bookcases in front of the windows.
This "stall system" (i.e.
fixed bookcases perpendicular to exterior walls pierced by closely spaced windows) was characteristic of English institutional libraries.
In European libraries, bookcases were arranged parallel to and against the walls.
This "wall system" was first introduced on a large scale in Spain's El Escorial.
Also, in Eastern Christianity monastery libraries kept important manuscripts.
The most important of them were the ones in the monasteries of Mount Athos for Orthodox Christians, and the library of the Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt for the Coptic Church. 
When Real and Virtual Worlds Collide: A Second Life Library is a research paper carried out by Chase Baity, Pam Chappell, David Rachlin, C. Vinson and Marilyn Zamarripa.
The group studied traditional public libraries, their Second Life counterparts, and independent Second Life in order to find out whether independent Second Life libraries or libraries affiliated with a Real Life library were the most successful.
They used surveys, focus groups, and interviews.
Over 350 users and 15 staff members participated in the study.
The research questions for the study were:  What are the integrated goals between the real world and virtual world libraries?
What is the optimal way to deliver services to reach these goals that are highly usable for employees and patrons?
How usable currently is the virtual library?
A secondary question was looking at how other real life and Second Life libraries are similar to or different from the Olathe project.
The study found that "Second-Life-only libraries are far more popular than Second Life branches of public libraries".
They also found that "there are no clear indications of what makes a Second Life library more or less popular than an other. 
In 1533, the king appears to have entrusted Leland with a document, "a moste gratius commission" (or "principis diploma" as he called it in Latin), which authorized him to examine and use the libraries of all religious houses in England.
Leland spent the next few years travelling from house to house, for the most part shortly before they were dissolved, compiling numerous lists of significant or unusual books in their libraries.
About 1535, he met the ex-Carmelite churchman and fellow antiquary John Bale, who much admired his work and offered his assistance.
In 1536, not long after the First Suppression Act commanding the dissolution of lesser monasteries was passed, Leland lamented the spoliation of monastic libraries and addressed Thomas Cromwell in a letter seeking aid for the rescue of books.
He complained that "The Germans perceive our desidousness, and do send daily young scholars hither that spoileth , and cutteth them out of libraries, returning home and putting them abroad as monuments of their own country."
In the 1530s and 1540s, the royal library was reorganised to accommodate hundreds of books that were previously kept in monastic collections.
Leland himself describes how Henry's palaces at Greenwich, Hampton Court and Westminster were adapted for the purpose.
Leland's part in this is uncertain.
In humanist fashion, Leland styled himself "antiquarius", a title which was at one time interpreted as referring to a formal appointment as 'king's antiquary': however, it is now understood to have been merely Leland's own preferred way of describing himself.
There is no evidence that he personally oversaw the relocation of the books to their new home or received a librarian's wages.
What he did do was to compile his lists of important volumes, and to take measures to encourage their preservation.