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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.
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."

Footnote

Beilage zur Süddeutschen Zeitung. - Mit einer Abbildung: The Library of Alexandria, established in the third century B.C., amassed an imposing collection of 500.000 books.

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Content

David Nasaw, a historian and director of the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, said the ability to use keywords to locate books and documents could save academics traveltime and money and broaden their research. "This all captures people's imagination in a wonderful way," Said Kate Wittenberg, director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University. "But whether it's right or wrong is not the whole question and not the whole answer." This year Ms. Wittenberg's group completed a three-year study of research habits that included 1,233 students. The study concluded that electronic resources had become the main tool for gathering information, particularly among undergraduates. But Ms. Wittenberg does have concerns. "What I've learned is that libraries help people formulate questions as well as find answers," Ms. Wittenberg said. "Who will do that in a virtual world?" On the other hand, she Said, an enhanced databank could make it easier for students to research topics across disciplines. For example, a topic like "climate change" touches an both political science and science, she Said, and "in the physical world, the books about them are in two different buildings at Columbia." Online research could bring the two subjects together instantly. Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Princeton who is writing a book about the history of books, noted that by looking at a book's binding and paper quality, a researcher can discern much about the period in which it was published, the publisher and the intended audience.