April 2001

Information Cosmos

Continued from page 1

By Henry Jenkins

Theory must be grounded. Alongside the reading rooms stood a menagerie, an observatory, a dissecting room, botanical gardens and a cafeteria where scholars broke bread together. Their work combined making and thinking, the sciences and the humanities, the stench of pachyderms and the crackle of papyrus. Insofar as contemporary education encourages abstraction over experience and specialization over breadth, it compromises those ideals.

Power corrupts. In his desire to amass knowledge, Alexander granted librarians almost unlimited power. Ships entering the port were raided, all books confiscated. The owners later received copies; the originals remained state property. However worthy its aims, state power represents a danger to liberty and must be carefully monitored.

Ignorance breeds backlash. While a resource for scholars, the library remained closed to the public. Demagogues exploited that isolation, stirring up the masses. The resulting culture war pitted Christians against "pagans," the public against scholars. Rioters seized Hypathia, a remarkable woman who had made major contributions to math, physics and astronomy, dragging her from her chariot and slashing her with seashells. Mobs reportedly looted and destroyed the library itself. In the absence of public discussion, ignorance begets moral panic.

Centralization represents vulnerability, not strength. The librarian's dream was to assemble all the world's books in one location. Ptolemy III, for example, coveted the original manuscripts of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. When the Athenians refused to part with them, Ptolemy left a deposit in gold for their loan. Then, he forfeited the treasure, keeping the manuscripts, which perished with the library. How many more masterworks might have survived if they had remained in Athens? The strength of the new digital culture is that it originates from many sources, is stored on many servers and is distributed through a variety of pathways. We should be leery of schemes that compromise these systems.

Planners of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina seem to have learned many of these lessons. The extraordinary facility will have reading rooms larger than Grand Central Station, architecture that fuses ancient symbols with futuristic structures, and a computer catalogue that enables searches in multiple languages. It will also incorporate a planetarium, an Information Studies school, and museums of archaeology, calligraphy and science. Its stacks will be open to scholars and the general public. The modest initial collection of 300,000 books falls short of amassing all the world's knowledge, but the library's real importance is symbolic, enabling Egypt to embrace its cosmopolitan past and holding open the ideal of intellectual freedom against a sometimes repressive government. Still, I wonder if Egypt-and the modern world in general-is ready to revive the ideals of the ancient library. Or is the facility's mission doomed to be compromised by social and political forces beyond its control?