Windows 7 Libraries. What's Happened to Our Schools?

I've finally decided to upgrade from Windows XP into the modern world. I have a new Dell Inspiron on my desk and am gradually moving files over onto it.

One of the first new things I discovered on the Windows 7 machine was "Libraries" for such things as photos and music. They appear to be a very nifty concept, bringing together similar files from multiple file directories in a "virtual directory." You get to specify the real folders involved and Windows seems to keep them updated at a pretty rapid clip.

But, I'm one of those people who likes to read the manual and know what's really going on. Maybe I should buy a good Windows 7 book. Meanwhile, I checked the "Help" function in Windows. I get this definition explaining "What is a library?"

Libraries are where you go to...

In my grade school, I'd probably have gotten my knuckles rapped with a ruler by the time I got that much of a definition out of my mouth. "You don't define a noun by saying where or when, Mr. Sawyer," would have been the immediate response at St. Charles grade school in Portland!

The Windows 7 Help explanation goes on by explaining what libraries are not and how they are different from other things:

Libraries don't actually store your items. They monitor folders that contain your items, and let you access and arrange the items in different ways. For instance, if you have music files in folders on your hard disk and on an external drive, you can access all of your music files at once using the Music library.

Defining something by what it is not would have gotten a knuckle-rapping for sure!

But alas, no explanation of what they are. So if you arrived here trying to figure out what they are, let's take a crack at it!

Libraries are a conceptual view of storage on your computer. They are represented by the File Manager as a "virtual folder" which displays selected content from one or more real folders.

There, we defined a noun with a noun! End of rant.

Of course we still don't really know what libraries are. What is actually behind that virtual folder? Perhaps an index file of some sort that is maintained by a task or process that is of undefined name? It's a shame that this kind of basic knowledge that is key to figuring out "How did that happen" isn't shared out in the light of day.