Wednesday 15 December 1999

Pic of the day: The Great Library of Kristiansand.

When you play Civ2, one of the neatest things to build is the Great Library. In honor of the Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, this game construct gives you free access to any civilization advance shared by two or more civilizations. A great way to catch up if you're not the tech leader in all areas. Sadly, it expires after a while, as did the one in the real world.

The Great Library preserved much of the philosophy and poetry of the ancient Hellenistic culture, but it suffered the misfortune of literally being a Museum - a temple dedicated to the Muses, patron goddesses or spirits of the arts. While these are today mentioned only as metaphors of human inspiration, the monotheists of old counted them as competing deities and were not a-mused. It is generally thought that the last Great Librarian (a female philosopher) was killed in a gruesome way by enraged christians. It is possible that the library was burned on that occasion ... in fact, it seems to have been burned now and again, but its final devastation is said to have happened under Muslim rule. This is so much more surprising as Muslim sages preserved several snippets of ancient Greek writing that were lost to western Europe for centuries.

In the "Mars Now!" scenario for Civ2, the effects of the Great Library are emulated by Aerial Photorecon. Nobody seems to have thought of the obvious modern-time replacement of the Great Library. You're using it right now. Yup, yup. The Internet is the greatest Great Library there ever was.

Modern historians suspect that the 500 000 scrolls of the Great Library contained quite a bit wild speculation and dross poetry along with all the good stuff. Certainly this is the case with Internet. What we really could need is a team of Great Librarians. There are some efforts, but the problem is that there are two conflicting goals. On one hand, the strength of the Net is that it includes so much; on the other hand, you are often looking for authoritative sources: Stuff you can trust. If I had written that the Great Library was sacked and burned by the Jews, how would a random high-schooler know that I was just making it up? Unless they already knew, in which case they would not be looking for the info. (Or they might know Jewish culture and see how unlikely it was. Alexandria was actually one of the main centers of Jewish intelligentsia.)

The one main complaint that my friends have about the Internet is that it is impossible to find anything there except by luck. The search engines just list loads and loads of dross that you have to go through like some archeologist excavating with a spoon. Even the user-friendly search engines like "Ask Jeeves" suffer from this problem. You may be allowed to ask them in natural language, but they still serve up mostly irrelevant stuff. When asking Jeeves "Who destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria", Jeeves helpfully reffered me to yellow pages listing libraries in Alexandria, VA. I'm happy to see that their great libraries are still standing, but this may not be overly helpful for the student of history.
(In all fairness, somewhat more helpful pointers were found towards the bottom of the page, though still not any obvious answer.)

Another extreme is using hand-picked links to reliable sources. In effect, this is like having a Great Librarian helping you find stuff. A fairly new and very promising candidate here is Encyclopaedia Britannica. The paper version of the Encyclopaedia was a large and thorough work, which would educate any average person to a higher level of insight within the frames of Anglo-Saxon culture. It scope has steadily broadened, and the Internet version interfaces easily and almost seamlessly with other respectable online resources.

The best way to use a library is not really as a quick fix to find the answer to random questions. The ideal resource if you visit a library is time. Time to browse the rows of books until you find something that catches your eye. Time to sit down and look through the index, perhaps paging through the book to see a bit more. Then time to actually read it, if it seems worth it ... to disappear into the world as seen through they eyes of a stranger.

The lack of funding for public libraries is a reason for concern. But the lack of time is perhaps the largest threat to the renaissance that we could be having (and in some ways already have). Lack of time, lack of silence, lack of self discipline. The knowledge and insight is there for the taking, perhaps even wisdom for those who dig deep enough.

In slightly unrelated news, Superwoman called me today about some CD-ROM problem. She also incidentally mentioned that she had already had her alliance ring delivered to a Norwegian jeweller, hopefully in time for it to be finished for Christmas...
I keep forgetting that I'm dealing with a woman who is smarter than I am. I could get used to that, you know. Most guys do! :)