The Great Library of Amazonia

摘要

The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC. Through centuries of aggressive acquisition, the librarians of Alexandria, Egypt, collected hundreds of thousands of texts. None survives. During a final wave of destruction, in AD 641, invaders fed the bound volumes and papyrus scrolls into the furnaces of the public baths, where they are said to have burned for six months. "The lesson," says Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, "is to keep more than one copy." Kahle recently gave a copy of his digital archive of 10 billion Web pages to a new library in Alexandria. On a visit to the city last year, he sat down with Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of Egypt's president, and discussed his gift, which has all the advantages of a modern electronic resource: It can be instantly updated, easily searched, and endlessly replicated. Mubarak, with diplomatic politeness, allowed that she was impressed. Still, she ventured a protest: "But I love books!"