Egypt’s Biblioteca Alexandrina

Issue: Winter 2005

The Once and Future Library

In Quest of Knowledge

A repository of all human knowledge. It’s been the dream of scholars since the dawn of scholarship itself. During Hellenistic times, the dream came close to realization in the fabled Royal Library of Alexandria.

Founded in the 3rd century BCE by Ptolemy II, at its peak the great library was believed to hold up to 700,000 scrolls, including the complete writings of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. A magnet for scholarship, it was here that Archimedes invented the screw-shaped water pump, here that Eratosthenes measured the Earth’s diameter, and here that Euclid spelled out the rules of geometry.

To “grow” the magnificent collection, the library’s keepers practiced an early form of intellectual piracy: They seized every written record that entered Alexandria. Merchant ships docking in the city’s bustling port were systematically shaken down for scholarly booty. A small army of scribes was employed to copy such captured texts. Duplicates were later restored to their owners; the originals stayed in Alexandria.

Legend has it the Library of Alexandria burned when Caesar sacked the Egyptian capital in 48 BCE. What remained of the scholarly collection, preserved in nearby temples, was later torched by order of Emperor Theodosius – an early Christian zealous in his persecution of paganism.

Ever since that 4th-century bonfire, the closest the world has come to producing a truly “complete” library was in Washington, D.C. With more than 130 million items spanning approximately 530 miles of bookshelves, the Library of Congress houses arguably the largest collection of knowledge in the world. Other contenders are the august British Library and its rival, the Bibliotèque nationale de France.

Fast-forward to 2003 – the year Egypt, with help from UNESCO, resurrected the Biblioteca Alexandrina. The pyramid-inspired structure (yes, there’s a building) holds a core collection of 6,000 ancient manuscripts and 1,200 rare books. Top on the librarians’ to-do list: digitize this treasure for free public access. Next up, digitize 15,000 Arabic books a year. The new-world repository looks remarkably like a high-end copy shop.

In the 21st century, Alexandrina has become a symbol and a rallying cry for the awesome potential of open access to digital information. Collecting every piece of human knowledge, once unfathomable, is today not so far-fetched.

A year ago, Google, operator of the popular search engine, announced a partnership with several of the world’s leading libraries to systematically digitize their book collections. In the case of Stanford and the University of Michigan, that adds up to about 15 million volumes. (Right now, a robot somewhere in Palo Alto is scanning away at a rate of 1,000 pages an hour, blowing delicate puffs of air to turn the leaves.) Other participants include Harvard’s library system, Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the New York Public Library. The project faces an uphill battle with pending copyright litigation, but Google has forged ahead with a prototype (see print.google.com).

Another group headed by the Library of Congress, together with national libraries in Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands, is simultaneously creating a digital archive of 1 million (out-of-copyright) books to be made publicly available.

And don’t forget grassroots efforts. Since 1996, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Internet Archive (www.archive.org) has collected, by its own estimate, “approximately 1 petabyte of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month.” According to organizers, “this eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.”