Lisbet Rausing is writing about ambitious book digitisation projects in an article titled “Toward A New Alexandria” in The New Republic.
“Remarkable electronic libraries,” she writes, “are already being assembled. Google Books aims to catalogue about 16 million books. The nonprofit Internet Archive already has some 1 million volumes. Public expectations run ahead even of these efforts. To do research, only one in a hundred American college students turn first to their university catalogue. Over 80 percent turn first to Google.
“It is clear that if a new Alexandria is to be built, it needs to be built for the long term, with an unwavering commitment to archival preservation and the public good. A true public good itself, it probably needs to be largely governmentally funded. And, while a global and cooperative venture, it needs to be hosted by one organisation that is reputable, long-standing, nonprofit, and exists in a stable jurisdiction. The Library of Congress, the flagship institution of the world’s only surviving Enlightenment republic, comes to mind. There might be other possibilities, such as the New York Public Library, or the British Library, or a consortium of the world’s leading university libraries—UCLA, Harvard, Cambridge University, and so on.”
One doesn’t wish to take from Rausing’s article, which is interesting, complex, thought-provoking (and also very long), but one can’t help being reminded (yet again) of the appalling anglocentrism of so much American and English comment on books and culture. The French who famously have no word for entrepreneur will be less than amused (as ever) to hear that America is “the world’s only surviving Enlightenment republic”. But must we also assume that such grand universalising projects, which in theory at least offer an unprecedented diversity of cultural “product” to a huge international audience, should be conceived of only in terms of the English language? Or that those of the leading university or national libraries in the world which are unfortunate enough to be situated in non-English-speaking territories can be summed up by the phrase “and so on".
Read the full article here: