Founded circa 300bc, the Great Library of Alexandria was the most famed literary repository of the ancient world. In the U.S., In 1731, Ben Franklin and others founded America's first free-lending library, the Library Company of Philadelphia. Today, it is asked, would the concept of establishing (not maintaining, but establishing) a library pass the muster of local municipalities. Would municipalities be in favor of buying tremendous quantities of books, tapes, CDs and newspapers, and lend them out at no cost through facilities scattered throughout a widespread geographic area?
I hesitated for a long time before starting to try and answer this question.
I don’t think that the establishment of libraries at municipal level is equal to the task. I believe that municipal branches of a national, or better yet, a world library would do a much finer job.
Knowledge dissemination is a function we humans excel at. It alone places us apart from any animal species with which we share this planet. It takes us beyond the genetic instinct and beyond the ‘see, learn, do’ system that we share with all other inhabitants of the earth.
A man can perform an action with good results on one side of this planet. Provided that the action is documented well, another man on the other side of the planet can follow the instructions and perform the same action, with the same result. The two men need never meet and there is no need for the one to observe the other.
The same can be said of two people separated by a hundred years of time, or even the void of space. The big difference of course is that now, instead of the man needing to travel to the repository of knowledge (often a big journey for one wishing to visit the Great Library of Alexandria) the knowledge can be retrieved to wherever the man is.
Of course this deals only with the content of the book and not the actual book. It would not satisfy those who have a love of holding a book in order to read it.
All we need to make this come to pass is a facility to scan in or transcribe the contents of all the world’s books. That would be so much cheaper in the long term than maintaining all those libraries.
Oh. I forgot, we would also need to do away with censorship, copyright and probably politics.
Seriously, local libraries are a fine thing. They fulfil a function in the community they serve, but there are only so many documents that will fit in a given size of building. And there is the maintenance factor to consider.
I believe that electronic storage and distribution of knowledge is the direction in which we will go. It would be good to go global, but only time will tell if we will ever become wise enough to achieve that.
I hesitated for a long time before starting to try and answer this question.
I don’t think that the establishment of libraries at municipal level is equal to the task. I believe that municipal branches of a national, or better yet, a world library would do a much finer job.
Knowledge dissemination is a function we humans excel at. It alone places us apart from any animal species with which we share this planet. It takes us beyond the genetic instinct and beyond the ‘see, learn, do’ system that we share with all other inhabitants of the earth.
A man can perform an action with good results on one side of this planet. Provided that the action is documented well, another man on the other side of the planet can follow the instructions and perform the same action, with the same result. The two men need never meet and there is no need for the one to observe the other.
The same can be said of two people separated by a hundred years of time, or even the void of space. The big difference of course is that now, instead of the man needing to travel to the repository of knowledge (often a big journey for one wishing to visit the Great Library of Alexandria) the knowledge can be retrieved to wherever the man is.
Of course this deals only with the content of the book and not the actual book. It would not satisfy those who have a love of holding a book in order to read it.
All we need to make this come to pass is a facility to scan in or transcribe the contents of all the world’s books. That would be so much cheaper in the long term than maintaining all those libraries.
Oh. I forgot, we would also need to do away with censorship, copyright and probably politics.
Seriously, local libraries are a fine thing. They fulfil a function in the community they serve, but there are only so many documents that will fit in a given size of building. And there is the maintenance factor to consider.
I believe that electronic storage and distribution of knowledge is the direction in which we will go. It would be good to go global, but only time will tell if we will ever become wise enough to achieve that.
Comments