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- A snippet from Brewster Kahle's talk "What can be learned from Hernando Columbus and his library?"
+ A snippet from Brewster Kahle's 2022 talk "What can be learned from Hernando Columbus and his library?"
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Changed around line 41: With the promise of ever-declining costs of computer storage, the idea of record
- https://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/archive/how-much-info-2003/ How Much Information
+ https://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/archive/how-much-info-2003/ on How Much Information
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Changed around line 34: It could be that Hernando Columbus’s background in discovering, exploring, and
- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ 1945 paper in the Atlantic
+ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ 1945 paper in The Atlantic
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+ https://archive.org/details/brewster-kahle-hernando-columbus
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- https://archive.org/details/brewster-kahle-hernando-columbus
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Changed around line 18: The idea of a universal library has lived since the Library of Alexandria, where
+ https://archive.org/details/sim_library-quarterly_1989-01_59_1/page/1/mode/1up?q=%22Historic+Cataloging+Costs%2C+Issues%2C+and+Trends%22 $17 in 1989
+ https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=17+dollars+in+1989+worth+today $37 today
+ https://sfpl.org/sites/default/files/2020-12/sfpl-annual-report12172020.pdf $170 million
+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain 1936
+ http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1303731h.html#ch1 World Brain
+ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ 1945 paper in the Atlantic
+ https://archive.org/details/sim_atlantic_1945-07_176_1/page/101/mode/1up?q=Memex as appeared
+ https://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ksg97/ksg.html How Much Information Is There In the World
+ https://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/archive/how-much-info-2003/ How Much Information
+ https://archive.org/details/pitac-dl-9feb01 Universal Access to Human Knowledge
- The Google Book project (2004) set out to digitize all books. They currently estimate 100 million titles, and have achieved at least 25 million so far. The Internet Archive similarly attempts to digitize all books (currently over 6 million titles), but also everything else – all audio, film, television, radio, and digital artifacts such as webpages and social media posts. The Internet Archive seems to be the most similar project to Hernando’s Library project.
+ The Google Book project (2004) set out to digitize all books. They currently estimate 100 million titles, and have achieved at least 25 million so far. The Internet Archive similarly attempts to digitize all books (currently over 6 million titles), but also everything else – all audio, film, television, radio, and digital artifacts such as webpages and social media posts. The Internet Archive seems to be the most similar project to Hernando’s Library project.
+ https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/arts/international/google-books-a-complex-and-controversial-experiment.html 25 million so far
+ https://archive.org/details/books 6 million titles
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- The idea of a universal library has lived since the Library of Alexandria, where the founding King commanded the librarian to “collect together all the books of the world” in 300 BC. This ideal was talked about by the humanists in the 15th century, but may not have been attempted again until Hernando Columbus. And then after him, another major attempt at such a goal may have waited until our present day.
+ The idea of a universal library has lived since the Library of Alexandria, where the founding King commanded the librarian to “collect together all the books of the world” in 300 BC. This ideal was talked about by the humanists in the 15th century, but may not have been attempted again until Hernando Columbus. And then after him, another major attempt at such a goal may have waited until our present day.
+ https://archive.org/details/vanishedlibrary00canf/page/120/mode/1up?q=%22all+the+books%22 collect together all the books of the world
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+ # Universal Access to All Knowledge
+
+ authors Brewster Kahle
+
+ Source
+ https://archive.org/details/brewster-kahle-hernando-columbus
+
+ The idea of a universal library has lived since the Library of Alexandria, where the founding King commanded the librarian to “collect together all the books of the world” in 300 BC. This ideal was talked about by the humanists in the 15th century, but may not have been attempted again until Hernando Columbus. And then after him, another major attempt at such a goal may have waited until our present day.
+
+ The public library system of Andrew Carnegie shared the vision of public access to knowledge, but built curated collections rather than universal ones. This limitation was somewhat overcome with the growth of interlibrary lending in the 20th century, but making it useful would wait for the digital age.
+
+ Even the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world by far, does not have a goal of building a universal collection or of broad public access. While the Library of Congress has a legal deposit rule to require all US publishers to give 2 copies to them, and has 10 staff in Cairo and 30 staff members in Delhi to acquire published materials, it does not set out to be universal. It throws away ⅔ of the works that are submitted via legal deposit, and picks carefully what it wants from foreign lands. The Library of Congress’ selectivity may somewhat reflect the cost of cataloging and preservation traditionally. Just cataloging an item was $17 in 1989, which is $37 today. Another factor may be that the Library of Congress, and National Libraries, do not support much public access to their collections, so there is not a feedback of demand. University and school libraries do support access, but only to specific users, which directs their collection criteria. Public libraries similarly collect carefully and deaccession regularly. There are no print libraries, that I am aware of, that strive for universal collections, other than the current Open Library, which is allied with the Internet Archive. Few physical libraries allow the full public to have access. Google and the Internet Archive are the only digital libraries that strive for universal collections.
+
+ So how could Hernando Columbus be so bold as to want to collect it all and then make it accessible to everyone? One reason could be that he lived in a very special time: a new technology, printing, brought down the cost of acquisition. This lower cost was for made for a blossoming of popular books, not just monastic and legal accounts. Therefore, the number of books that would be desirable for many people to read grew quickly, which would make a library popular.
+
+ Some argue that printed books then became too numerous to collect them all, but this does not quite make sense. Even now, the total production of print books from major publishers to an American audience is expanding at approximately 200,000 titles a year. At $20 per book, acquiring one of each would only be four million dollars a year. Even if these are low estimates, a city library, such as the San Francisco Public Library, with its annual budget of $170 million, could acquire them all if it had the motivation to do so.
+
+ It could be that Hernando Columbus’s background in discovering, exploring, and mapping gave him a different approach to knowledge than others: that all published works could be contained and understood. A different perspective, a reassessing of the opportunities, and applying ideas from the successful circumnavigation of the earth, could have been a necessary condition of Hernando’s vision.
+
+ After Hernando came similar dreams and visions, such as Diderot's Encyclopédie in 1751, and H. G. Wells’ collection of essays in 1936, World Brain. Vannevar Bush, in his 1945 paper in The Atlantic, (as appeared), describes the “Memex,” and Ted Nelson devised Hypertext systems. These all pointed in a direction of expanded access to the library, but the bold vision of collecting everything published might wait further.
+
+ With the promise of ever-declining costs of computer storage, the idea of recording all published works seemed possible to some of us in the early 1980s. As computing capacity increased exponentially, search, manipulation, and artificial intelligence would become possible, and computer networks could help in distribution and collection. I led many conversations from 1983 to 1986 with Richard Feynman, Steven Wolfram, Danny Hillis, and Marvin Minsky on the subject of how long it would take us to get everything ever published all online, and what we would do then. Our timings proved optimistic, but not because we were wrong about the technology; rather because we did not appreciate the resistance that corporations would mount.
+
+ So technologists, such as myself in 1980 at MIT, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the mid-1990s at Stanford, certainly saw the opportunity to collect all the published works in digital form, and then acted on it. The idea was in the air. Mike Lesk, the father of digital libraries, wrote How Much Information Is There In the World? in 1997, and Peter Lyman, the University of California Berkeley librarian and early Internet Archive board member, wrote a paper in 2003 on How Much Information? All of these efforts tried to quantify information production, both published and unpublished, and then some would attempt to build the Great Library.
+
+ Other efforts also stand out. Michael Hart started Project Gutenberg in 1970 which was a volunteer project to key all public domain books into readable computer forms, with aspirations to have all books in all languages available to everyone. Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence professor at Carnegie Mellon, led the Million Books Project in the early 2000s, which involved the Internet Archive, successfully digitizing over one million books. Reddy issued a call for Universal Access to Human Knowledge in 2001.
+
+ The Google Book project (2004) set out to digitize all books. They currently estimate 100 million titles, and have achieved at least 25 million so far. The Internet Archive similarly attempts to digitize all books (currently over 6 million titles), but also everything else – all audio, film, television, radio, and digital artifacts such as webpages and social media posts. The Internet Archive seems to be the most similar project to Hernando’s Library project.
+
+ Hernando’s vision has taken root once again in many projects, similarly coming from outside the established library institutions.
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brewsterKahleHernandoColumbus.pdf