Collecting and sharing knowledge are activities which are almost as important as creating knowledge. Yet, the ideas of collecting and sharing knowledge have changed over time, reflecting society’s needs. That’s why it’s necessary to study the evolution of the idea of collecting and sharing knowledge from the first libraries of the Near East during the Bronze Age, used by priests and rulers, through the new concept developed by Pliny the Elder, who wrote the earliest encyclopedic work that has survived to the present in the 1st century AD, and the first encyclopedias, covering a wide range of topics written in the Enlightenment era, all the way to the digital encyclopedias published on CD-ROMs and online encyclopedias like Wikipedia.