History of the Vatican Library

History of the Vatican Library, published on the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana's own website, is the library's institutional self-account of its founding under Pope Nicholas V in the mid fifteenth century, its formal establishment under Sixtus IV in 1475 with Bartolomeo Platina as its first librarian, and its subsequent growth. Its strength is that a holding institution's own history is authoritative for exactly the kind of fact it reports, founding dates, named early librarians and the physical growth of the collection, since no outside source has better access to that institutional record than the institution itself. Its limit is that an institutional self-account emphasizes foundation and growth rather than the more contested episodes in the library's history, including periods of restricted access and the provenance disputes attached to some of its holdings, so a claim about those more contested aspects needs an independent scholarly history rather than the library's own page.