Andrew Carnegie was a huge supporter of public libraries and endowed over 2500 public libraries world wide with most of them in the United States, Canada, and h

Andrew Carnegie was a huge supporter of public libraries and endowed over 2500 public libraries world wide with most of them in the United States, Canada, and his native Scotland around the turn of the 20th century. Part of the requirements to receive an endowment was that the operations needed to be paid with public funding and that the library would be free to use for everyone. These Carnegie libraries are basically the model of the modern public library. They were some (maybe the first?) of the public libraries that had open stacks. A lot of the original libraries are still in use or have been expanded. Most of the buildings that were once libraries are now open museums or other buildings that are cultural and art centers open to the public.