Mindlin, A.: ¬The pursuit of knowledge, from Babel to Google (2004)
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- Content
- If Babel symbolized our incommensurate ambition, the Library of Alexandria showed how this Ambition might be achieved. Set up by Ptolemy I in the third century B.C., it was meant to hold every book an every imaginable subject. To ensure that no title escaped its vast catalog. a royal decree ordered that any book brought into the City was to be confiscated and copied; only then would the original (sometimes the copy) be returned. A curious document from the second century B.C., the perhaps apocryphal "Letter of Aristeas," recounts the library's origins. To assemble a universal library (says the letter), King Ptolemy wrote "to all the sovereigns and governors an earth" begging them to send to him every kind of book by every kind of author, "poets and prose writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians and all others, too." The king's librarians calculated that they required 500.000 scrolls if they were to collect in Alexandria "all the books of all the peoples of the world." But even this (by our standards) modest stock of a half-million books was too much for any reader. The librarians of Alexandria devised a system of annotated catalogs for which they chose works, they deemed especially important, and appended a brief description to each title - one of the earliest "recommended reading" lists. In Alexandria, it became clear that the greater your ambition, the narrower your scope. But our ambition persists recently, the most popular Internet search service. Google, announced that it had concluded agreements with several leading research libraries to make some of their books available online to researchers.
