Whither the library? a new book wonders anew

An elegant new book considers the meaning- and future- of libraries:

For our ancestors, the question would have appeared inane, if not unnecessary. So obvious would the answer have seemed that even as far back as the Library of Alexandria, which stood for many centuries as the incarnation of human knowledge, neither historians nor travellers saw any great need to tell their readers about that most emblematic library of all, founded by the Ptolemaic kings in the third century BC. The scraps of information that have come down to us reveal almost nothing about the way the famous library was set up, about its stacks and desks, its rules and regulations, its users or their reading practices. Even its precise location remains unknown to us, whether it stood in the Musaeion, the House of the Muses, or in a separate building, or in several. Its end is as mysterious as its physical appearance, and over time a number of legends were concocted to remedy this lack of trustworthy information, casting Julius Caesar, the fanatical Bishop Cyril, or the Arab invaders in the seventh century as the book-burning villains. Whatever its true story, the Library of Alexandria – colossal, ghostly, universally celebrated – has come to embody the answer to the question of a library’s identity: a symbol of the society that houses it, an emblem of its power, a depository of its experience. Also, as Edith Hall remarks in the first essay of the collection, Alexandria gave us

“the actual concept of the library as an institution where the whole resource constitutes something infinitely greater than the sum of the parts. The parts are the individual records left by individual writers; the whole is something far more ambitious: an instrument designed to preserve intact the memory of humankind.”

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1640113.ece