  illennia ago, a great Library was built in Egypt at the intersection of three continents. Though the Library was destroyed centuries ago, it was the chief glory of the ancient world, and it has not been forgotten. The story of a universal library, having come into the world, has never left. Today, something like the Library of Alexandria is coming into existence through digital technologies. We now have within our reach the power to put all our knowledge online and to increase everyone's access to it. To build a truly universal library, every neighborhood and town and school will need to help. Robert Hutchins once commented that in a world as pluralistic and contentious as ours, maybe the only community that will survive is the community of fellow seekers after truth. To help build our library is to join that community. What was most important about the lost Library of Alexandria was the community that gathered there around the pursuit of knowledge. Every good library lives through its community of scholars. Perhaps a hundred scholars lived there full time, researching the past and exploring the secrets of nature, but thousands of others visited and the voices of hundreds of thousands more were collected and preserved on parchment and papyrus scrolls. It was a community of truth, made up of people of all ethnic and religious groups, drawn together in a great conversation about great subjects aimed at removing error and adding detail to our knowledge of nature and history. The Library at Alexandria was the main wonder of the ancient world. The gathering together of 700,000 books in a single collection in a world where books were hand-copied and rare was not a simple event. Rather, it was a project that brought thousands of people into collaboration over centuries. Writers, readers, manuscript copiers and illustrators, book traders, librarians, scientists, artists, administrators, fundraisers, emperors all contributed to the greatest monument to human knowledge that ever existed until quite recently. ERROR MSGThe city of Alexandria was founded on orders from Alexander the Great after his conquest of Egypt (331 B.C.E.). Standing on the Nile delta looking at the blue Mediterranean Harbor under the brilliant sun, Alexander grasped at once that this could be the site of a great city. Indeed it became one of the principal cities of the world, a vast metropolis of marble. Perhaps one fourth of the city consisted of royal palaces and public buildings but even private residences were made of stone. The city contained distinct districts where Egyptians, Jews, and Greeks lived, but its streets were filled with people from all over the world: Macedonian soldiers, Africans, Babylonians, Syrians, Persians, Italians, Gauls, and Iberians. The abundant grain of the Nile made it a commercial center while the political tensions of the ancient world kept it a focal point of repeated wars. But its many contests for power and wealth are mostly forgotten. What ancient Alexandria is best remembered for today is its Library. In its halls, and theatres and lecture rooms, it became possible for the first time to engage in systematic study. For the first time, the intellectual resources of the world were gathered, preserved, and organized. This gathering led to other gatherings--those of scholars, pursuers of knowledge. New disciplines came into existence. Knowledge began to multiply itself. Humankind took a significant step forward, forever. This is one of the great world stories, spanning a thousand years. The New Alexandria: A Universal Digital Library  Today, through digital technologies, something like the Library at Alexandria is coming within reach of everyone who lives on earth. We have the technical means to put the power of knowledge within reach of all the earth's peoples. Many people are crippled because they do not have access to information about medicine, engineering, science, literature, poetry, agriculture, politics, society, and other topics.
Building a satellite and fiber optic network that includes all the earth's people will be easier than teaching the uses of knowledge, but both will come if enough of us desire it. The prospect seems daunting to some. When they look at the vast archives of records we already possess slowly disintegrating into dust, they cannot see how so much information could be digitized or what we would use it for. Of course, we don't know most of what we will use it for, but as search engines become more powerful and the capacity to search millions of documents in seconds looking for particular items becomes more advanced, researchers will begin to pose questions that were inconceivable only a short time ago. If the knowledge is accessible, we will find uses that will astonish and dazzle us. Others worry that there will simply be too much--even given nearly free storage. Already research in some topics seems daunting because so much information is available no one can reach the end of it. But we will find ourselves living with this library somewhat like we live with nature herself: no one claims there is too much nature. Too many stars, too many lakes, too many trees and forests, too many clouds, too many sand dunes, too many geese coursing the evening skies. We will never see them all but we are delighted to know they are there. We have see the vision of a universal library with all knowledge, music, art and science available free to everyone, and we will build it. This is the great story of this age, which is only a continuation of the main story of human existence: the gradual but unstoppable discovery and construction of knowledge. Building this library is this generation's greatest work. Competing Stories Of course, there are other stories competing for our allegiance. There always are. Such stories were wildly competing for attention throughout the building of the Library at Alexandria. In one of them, Julius Caesar comes to the eastern Kingdom conquering and pauses to savor Cleopatra's charms. She provided feasts of meat and fish and fowl, served with exotic sauces on tables spread with flowers and aromatic spices, accompanied with fine wines in gold and crystal chalices kept full by perfectly trained slaves. He enjoyed the great palaces, the sensuous dancing, the exquisite confections, and the wondrous perfumes in the company of the young Macedonian-Greek girl with her lithe body, brilliant mind, and stunning charm. cheap hotel in MalagaFor her part, Cleopatra knew the arts of seduction and the uses of great power. Caesar was the greatest conqueror since Alexander, and when he visited the Library she noted quickly his appreciative gaze at the rare scrolls she showed him. The military adventurer was also a lover of books. So she made of them a gift. The Librarians, startled and distraught, could say nothing. The priceless cargo was carried to a warehouse near the harbor. But while Caesar and Cleopatra partied, each seduced by the other, the riot-prone city rose against him, perhaps 20,000 men led by Cleopatra's brother Ptolemy XIV against the small 3,500 man contingent he had with him. To prevent the enemy's fleet from reaching the docks, Caesar ordered arrows tipped with resin set aflame and fired into the ships tied at the docks. This ignited a conflagration which burned the docks and the warehouses nearby, including the precious scrolls. Or so some versions of the story go. What we know for sure is that over the centuries Alexandria was seldom long without bloody riots where angry mobs rose against whatever government tried to keep the precarious order. Ethnic strife was a daily reality, and political opportunists developed traditions of inflaming the mobs to hatred over this or that action or policy. One riot was triggered when a soldier killed a slave in an argument over who had the better sandals. Possessions, trade, bickering, political strategizing, and war occupied the minds of many people, then as now. Local riots and larger wars linked to the rise and fall of empires swept through Alexandria frequently, leaving behind many stories about partial destructions of the Library. The details of its repeated remodelings, burnings, and rebuildings are lost in the past and twisted by legend. Who destroyed the Library? Christians blamed Muslims, Muslims blamed Christians, Jews blamed Romans, Romans blamed Jews, and so on. But the important story may not be that the Library was eventually destroyed completely by bigotry and war. Such stories are always among us. The important story may be that in a greedy, ignorant, and violent world, it was built at all. Various stories are always afoot in the world, and we have considerable control over which our own lives are organized into. The Best Story Wins In the short run, war and ignorance win many a battle. But when a more powerful story comes into the world, it spreads from person to person, culture to culture, and in time changes everything. The vast rise of human knowledge has faced ferocious enemies. It has met enormous obstacles and wrenching set-backs. But it has been relentless in its progress. Motel barato EsbjergThis is because no matter the temptations or threats, some people remain committed to learning and to teaching. And once people have seen a truth and understood it, they seldom return to error. Thus does knowledge, slowly and with apparently haphazard progress, dispel error. In the long run, the most powerful story overcomes weaker stories--that is, the story that best accounts for the facts, that weaves them into the most revealing and useful patterns of meaning. And so, we will build our universal library. Those who oppose the work will, for the most part, come to nothing. Those who help will find that irresistible force that Machiavelli called "fortune" and that St. Paul called "providence" but that I will just call "history" on their side. Serendipity will bless their labors.
ERROR MSGI learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. . . If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. Henry David Thoreau
(Walden, pp. 323- 324)
More about the Library at Alexandria 2000 Michael Umphrey |
