Overviews the notable events and underlying trends that either furthered or deterred the growth of the institution. For each of six periods during the century, summarizes the social, cultural, and political characteristics then reviews the broad thrust of library service and details notable professional developments. The introduction provides the 19th-century background. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

For the first hundred years or so of their history, public libraries in Britain were built in an array of revivalist architectural styles. This backward-looking tradition was decisively broken in the 1960s as many new libraries were erected up and down the country. In this new Routledge book, Alistair Black argues that the architectural modernism of the post-war years was symptomatic of the age’s spirit of renewal. In the 1960s, public libraries truly became ‘libraries of light’, and Black further explains how this phrase not only describes the shining new library designs – with their open-plan, decluttered, Scandinavian-inspired designs – but also serves as a metaphor for the public library’s role as a beacon of social egalitarianism and cultural universalism. A sequel to Books, Buildings and Social Engineering (2009), Black's new book takes his fascinating story of the design of British public libraries into the era of architectural modernism.

The Public Library is regarded in the people's institution. It is local gateway to knowledge that provides basic condition for life learning and facilitates cultural development of the individual and social groups. The public library provides services to all irrespective of age, sex, cast, religion, education, and social studies, generally all users get the material relevant to their needs and requirements in the public library. The advent of information technology from the middle of 20th century has gradually changed the traditional process of information acquisition, communication and storage. The society is transformed with new a paradigm which is regarded as information society or knowledge society. Along with the traditional form of reading material such as books, manuscripts the new forms like microfiche, CDs, e-books, etc. In a society of lifelong learning - whether of a formal or informal nature- public libraries will be nodes connecting the local learning setting with the global resources of information and knowledge. Public libraries must therefore be allowed to play a role of fundamental importance in the development of future systems of lifelong learning. The development of the information and communication technology has already laid the basis for the creation of information networks, giving users even of small local public libraries access to the world wide sources of information. The public libraries also offer guidance and training in information search and quality rating of information sources. Thus, public libraries are necessary if not sufficient prerequisites for a democratic knowledge society. The importance of the idea of the library organization as a social institution became so powerful that it also became a basic tenet of the library field, the basis for what since that time has become one of the field's common assumptions, that the modern library in and of itself, the library as a social organization, is the field's most significant cultural legacy to society. Libraries and other similar type of institutions collect, process, organize and disseminate information and knowledge recorded in document.