Manchester Library & Information Service

There are 24 public libraries in Manchester, England, including the famous Central Library in St Peter’s Square. As of 2012^[update] Central Library is closed for refurbishment, but will reopen on 22 March 2014.

The oldest community library still in use is Levenshulme Library in South Manchester, built in 1903. Levenshulme Library is also a Carnegie library, having been built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who funded the building of over 2,500 libraries across the world. Two new multimillion-pound libraries have recently opened in North Manchester as part of a major regeneration scheme, including the eco-designed North City Library in Harpurhey. and The Avenue Library and Learning Centre in Higher Blackley.

There has been a public library service in Manchester since 1852, when the Manchester Free Library opened in the Hall of Science, Campfield, on the site of what is now the Museum of Science and Industry. Famous figures such as Charles Dickens and William Thackeray attended and spoke at its inauguration. Manchester had taken advantage of powers granted by the Public Libraries and Museums Act of 1850 to become the first local authority to establish a rate-supported public lending and reference library.Andrea Crestadoro, Chief Librarian of the city 1864–1879, is credited with being the first person to propose that books could be catalogued by using keywords that did not occur in the title of the book.

In 1915 the libraries consisted of a reference library, 24 lending libraries, a foreign library, the Henry Watson Music Library and the Thomas Greenwood Library for Librarians. The number of volumes altogether exceeded half a million and the stock of the lending libraries was arranged according to the Dewey Decimal Classification. The library was housed in temporary buildings in Piccadilly on the site of the former Manchester Royal Infirmary. The Moss Side library contained special collections on Thomas de Quincey, Mrs. Gaskell and the Brontës and the foreign library was temporarily housed at the Cheetham branch. The Henry Watson Music Library contained 30,000 volumes and hundreds of thousands of pieces of music; the Thomas Greenwood Library for Librarians contained about 15,000 volumes. After the vacation of the first town hall in King Street the building was reused for the public lending library.

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