A collection of this magnitude necessarily required careful organisation. Scrolls were stored in recessed alcoves, where they could be stacked in organised groups. The sheer size of the Alexandrian library demanded far more systematic cataloguing, with books split between many different chambers. The texts were stored alphabetically, though presumably also organised by genre, the leading principle of classification in every institutional library thereafter. A feature of the Alexandrian library was the high quality of the scholars recruited as librarians. One, Callimachus of Cyrene, completed the first ever bibliographical dictionary of authors.

Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile Hist…, loc. 56