As places for the collection of information, libraries are among the oldest known types of?building. In all ages, they have had to take account of five main factors: the form of the media to be stored; the nature of their use; continuously increasing stocks; artistic and architectural changes of style; and, in conjunction with all these aspects, ongoing technological developments. Libraries are often national institutions that have to express a content beyond their function as depositories of information. Examples of this include the National Library of France in?Paris by Dominique Perrault, the British Library in London by?Colin St John Wilson, and the library in Alexandria, Egypt, by Snøhetta Hamza Consortium.With the creation of written documents, the need arises to store them. In Nineveh some 2,700 years ago, the scribes of King Ashurbanipal of Assyria had to ensure the storage and ordering of clay tablets with cuneiform script. Storage conditions changed with the development of new materials for keeping records, such as parchment and papyrus. Two of the most extensive papyrus libraries in antiquity were in Pergamum, Asia Minor, and in Alexandria, Egypt, which was said to contain some 550,000 scrolls. (Ulrich Naumann)