Library of New Alexandria ThinkingOutLoud.DonaldNoyes.200904231130.m06
A futuristic note: I envision a library to preserve knowledge, which I call the LibraryOfNewAlexandria. It is to be created to store knowledge. It is to be made physically secure, and accessible as readable documentation via the internet. Its contents will be available to all. It is to become the world's first complete and open library.
WikiPedia? (No)
- Encyclopedias, printed or web-based should be included by linking and preserved by archiving.
{I assume what the author envisions is a bricks-and-mortar repository for printed material and media of all kinds, including digital media, and a means for collecting these and distributing digital media (and digital copies of non-digital media) under some governance mechanism rather than a public free-for-all of digital contributions like
WikiPedia. My interpretation is that the author is describing something akin to an international Library of Congress.}
Since the first Library of Alexandria was brick and mortar, and was a repository of all kinds of perishable media, the LibraryOfNewAlexandria must avoid or at least minimize the possibility of the destruction of its contents as took place in the ancient library. It should be created with the purpose of accumulating and preserving artifacts and histories of what has been utilized by mankind. It should be managed for that purpose rather than any which centralizes control or disallows or hides that which is contributed. It should allow universal distribution.
It should avoid any sort of governance mechanism which limits the scope and extent of its contents by arbitrary censorship or academic or governmental content bias. It should however be such that opinion, supposition, and theory are never substituted for or become impersonators of fact. This does not mean that opinion and theory are disallowed, but rather that they are clearly identified. It should not be possible for those would limit or impose controls upon, or trace access to information by inquirers for nefarious purposes such as to limit, control and channel knowledge and place approvals or certifications based on extra-informational criteria and agendas.
Good idea. Will it be centralized or distributed? Who decides what it contains and what it doesn't?
Here is my idea of how it would work (my answer to the above questions?)
Two questions: Where and What? Actually four (also Who? and How? (described in each of the first three))
First question Where: CentralizedOrDistributed?
- Answer: It should be
- A CentralizedReference: Copies for Reference of parts or partitions of the Library would be made possible from the repository at any time by anyone. Cost of duplication into physical form and royalties required for content, would be shared equitably between the library and the enquirer. The copies would be made in a user compatible form to permit storage, retrieval and deletion of the copied items by the user only at his own discretion.
- Distributed: Publishing of the central repository and creations of other forms of its presentations would be allowed, the only provisions being those things which must contain source annotations, attributions, or copy-permissions by authors or originators. (copyrights, trademarks, etc.) Anything more than a fair and equitable use of such protected items requiring authorization of the copyright, or trademark, etc, holders, would be considered inappropriate and perhaps even illegal use, and could be subject to legal recourse.
- Conversational | Distributed content by Point-to-Point connections would also be enabled and allowed. Thus two connections might share conversationally both the content and comments and observations about it with each other. It would not be required that the library content be transmitted Point-to-point, since references to and access to the public portion could be hyperlink read only, copy protected access from the repository. This would have the potential of handling copyright and infringement concerns, since the access by the receiving party of the item would be similar to a check-out of a library item from a normal library.
Second question - What: Any and everything which could be reasonably and legally classified as open knowledge.
- Each item in the library would satisfy this requirement:
- Submissions will contain classifications and one-liner descriptions about the type of content, this to allow readers and indexers to get an idea of and to apply their own choices as to what they desire to access, index, or consume. Included would be scans and Ocrs of all books in and out of print being circulated by normal libraries, or in the cases of rare books, in the hands of collectors who wish to share them. (how part of what -> ) Queues for access would be designed so that most used and popular items are most quickly served, with capacity such that infrequently accessed items will be served in appropriately designed periods interspersed with frequent content.
- Third question: Who?
- Answer: Everyone can be creators and donors to the library. Scientists, Politicians, Inventors, Writers, NewsMakers?, Observers (those who merely record what they discover or uncover), Researchers, Questioners, Answerers, and many other groups or individuals. Included in the library could also be donated diaries of individuals. If the only knowledge one can contribute is what was important enough to record, this alone is knowledge worth saving.
Another question: Why not the entire internet?
- An attempt to do this was started as The Internet Archive It had mirrors created to lighten the load on its servers. The LibraryOfNewAlexandria is not such an attempt.
- Because the internet is not the knowledge, it is merely the vehicle of transport. Much of what is on the internet is transitional and unimportant from a knowledge standpoint. Internet transactions and events of note do qualify, some, but not all blogs it would be good to include, some but not all wikis, etc. Some but not all of the internet. It requires a filter of reasonable and at least interesting to qualify.
- Libraries serve as condensations of the complex interactions of society into a few pages. Thus the record of an important person's life in a library might be condensed to a few, if not only one or a part of one book. So the condensation continues, the book is further reduced to a citation or a summary, and so on until it becomes only a card, or reference, or a pointer to a locale and location.
- So it goes with all good libraries, that one can go from a general item in steps to that which is more specific or expansive, until such knowledge as the reader desires is reached.
- Which gives rise to a new occupation of sorts - human knowledge indexers and researchers. While Google and search engines can narrow down items in an online repository to a few thousand or hundreds, it take a human indexer to do the best kind or researching to make it in the tens, or possibly just a handful of possibilities.
Another benefit: Protection from destruction
- The library is open to all and copies can be made of it, an individual or group exercising public power wanting to suppress knowledge and discourse which, if the knowledge was only centralized, would be possible, would find it nearly impossible to do so due to the past allowance of copies which should exist in many locations. (These locations would be open to future discovery - see archaeological discoveries (caves, diggings) etc.) Time can be a preserver of artifacts, even if it is a destructor of the artifactors.
Other content categories submitted and archived:
- Submissions by SubjectMatterExperts in Specialized Collections which are peer-reviewed, readable in a form similar to WikiPedia, one each peer group or specialty.
- Submissions by Reporters, Journalists, Historians, Observers, Propagandists and Agenda-Driven Concerns, Merchandisers, and so on about the events and records of public transactions and events for each day, serving as a public record or journal. This would allow for future readers to see what the wisdom or lack thereof, their forebears had about their concerns and activities.
When the actual
LibraryOfNewAlexandria is built and furnished (which would require a five to fifty year creational period and an ongoing maintenance), user and submission guidelines should be issued to make it clear what is likely to survive as frequently served content, and though popular and trendy articles and submissions might be temporarily the rage. Over the long haul, quality, accuracy and pertinence will mark those things in the First and Second Piles. (See
OnePileFilingSystem) for template of a system the Servers would use to maintain a speedy, prioritized service mechanism for books, documents, and other artifacts.)
Current Efforts
While surfing today (20090421 - WaybackMachine) I stumbled upon an effort that, while not constructed to contain the features above, is an attempt to create a new brick and mortar library. It is not the LibraryOfNewAlexandria; it is called Bibliotheca Alexandrina and IsisDotOrg? seems to have copyrighted it under this name.
It presently mirrors content from the
WaybackMachine (The Internet Archive)
- The Internet Archive is a complete snapshot of all web pages on every website since 1996 till today. Since the average lifetime of a page on the Internet is 100 days, this snapshot is retaken every two months. The Internet Archive at BA includes the web collection of 1996 to 2006. It represents 1.5 petabytes of data stored on 880 computers. The entire collection is available for free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
- It has serious restrictions on its use:
- It has ceased new collections and updates as of 2008
Proposals
- Vision of what this library could become:
- Website promoting its creation
KnowledgeAccumulationAndManagement and the RoleOfLibraries
- Leveraging Intellectual Assets and Facilitating Knowledge Creation
- Knowledge Management requires linkage so as to realize sharing of knowledge, including tacit and explicit knowledge.
- information with information
- information with activities
- information with man -
L
ibrariesAsCentersOfCommunity
The distinguished Southern historian ShelbyFoote once observed that a university is a library surrounded by some other buildings. Given the news that I have heard of the positive flurry of library buildings in the town of Orange, we could say that a town is a gathering of libraries surrounded by some other buildings. Though that is a slightly flippant observation, it does point to the power and importance of libraries as both centers of communities and physical manifestations of their highest aspirations.
Dated Developments
Posted 20120109
- DPLA - Digital Public Library of America - 20111019
- A ..."next generation public library. Such a thing could incorporate one or more of many different elements: a set of physical buildings; a purely digital archive with an open API layer for coders to play around with; a full fledged digital lending library" Target: 2013
CategoryFuture
Library Of New Alexandria