Of all the departments in the University of Cambridge, the University Library is by far the oldest. The first volume in this set traces its evolution from its hesitant beginnings to its designation as a place of copyright deposit in the legislation of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The second volume takes the history of the Library from the time of the Copyright Act of Queen Anne and the gift by King George I of the celebrated book collection of John Moore, Bishop of Ely, to the end of the nineteenth century when the Library's place within the University and the scholarly world was well established. The text examines how the Library responded to educational reforms, charts the growth of collections and shows how the needs of undergraduates were answered in an international research library. Both volumes were originally published in 1986.
