My wife is an archivist. As a library
professional, one of her peeves is when technology workers, such as myself,
use library to
mean a collection of computer code. Because computer code libraries
generally are not managed by a librarian, the term seems misapplied.
I was surprised to read in John G. Kemeny's Man
and the Computer
the term library applied to collections of
computer code. In 1972 computer code collections had not grown to millions of
repositories to which today's programmers have access, but amount
of code was growing.
Since Kemeny is an inventor of BASIC, which has a LIBRARY keyword, I probably
should not have been surprised by this. Mostly, it feels just a bit strange
that the term library has been used for collections of reusable code just
about as long as collections of reusable computer code have existed!