Colleagues, please do not plan for the future library. Instead, realize that it is planning OUR future, that of human culture. It will grow organically, as did the current library: a library with a brick and mortar manifestation and an emergent property of information, just as each of us has in addition to our bodies. The library will grow and integrate its manifestations, using the tools of memory and communication available. The texts, images, scrolls, codices, internet pages, databases and networks will continue to emerge, seem chaotic and scattered at first, and then our ordered intelligence will organize it.
For each human inquiry, the more we understand about a field of knowledge, the easier it will be to organize. This has all happened before. Justinian's Code was produced with less understanding of how to outline, or mark legal principles and procedures. Little thought and less technique was devoted to how to retrieve it all. Later, more ordered strategies and tools emerged in the Napoleonic Code and, for common law systems, the West Key Number Digest, edited citators, and so on.
Perhaps I am too optimistic, but human minds, with a consciousness that may or may not be an emergent property of our neurological system and the farthest point in our biological evolution, seem to resist entropy in the collective. Only individual brains deteriorate; it seems that collective knowledge persists even if pared down by tragedies such as wars and their cultural destructiveness.
Both of these statements, the first being the famous original assertion by Daniel Dennett and the second my inversion of it, seem to have the potential to be true:
A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
A library is just a scholar's way of making another scholar.
For each human inquiry, the more we understand about a field of knowledge, the easier it will be to organize. This has all happened before. Justinian's Code was produced with less understanding of how to outline, or mark legal principles and procedures. Little thought and less technique was devoted to how to retrieve it all. Later, more ordered strategies and tools emerged in the Napoleonic Code and, for common law systems, the West Key Number Digest, edited citators, and so on.
Perhaps I am too optimistic, but human minds, with a consciousness that may or may not be an emergent property of our neurological system and the farthest point in our biological evolution, seem to resist entropy in the collective. Only individual brains deteriorate; it seems that collective knowledge persists even if pared down by tragedies such as wars and their cultural destructiveness.
Both of these statements, the first being the famous original assertion by Daniel Dennett and the second my inversion of it, seem to have the potential to be true:
A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
A library is just a scholar's way of making another scholar.
