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Content

The practical arguments for such a step are irrefutable: quantity, speed, precision, on-demand availability are no doubt important to the scholar: And new technologies need not be exclusionary. The invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and no doubt the screen and the reference books can feed oft Bach other and coexist amicably an the same reader's desk. All we need to do is remember the corollaries tethe arguments in favor of a virtual library:" that reading, in orderto allow reflection, requires slowness, depth and context; that leafing through a material book or roaming through material shelves is an intimate part of the craft; that the omnipresent electronic technology is still fragile and that, as it changes. we keep losing the possibility of retrieving that which was once stored in now outdated containers. We can still read the words an papyrus ashes saved from the charred ruins of Pompeii; we don't know for how lung it will be possible to read a text inscribed in a 2004 CD. This is not a complaint just a reminder. Jorge Luis Berges invented a Bouvard-and-Pécuchet-like charafter who tries to compile a universal encyclopedia so complete that nothing world be excluded from it. In the end, like his French forerunners, he falls. but not entirely. On the evening an which he gives up bis great project. he hires. a horse and buggy and takes a tour of the city. He sees brick walls, ordinary people. houses, a river, a marketplace and feels that somehow all these things are his own work. He realizes that his project was not impossible but merely redundant. The world encyclopedia, the universal library, already exists and is the world itself."