5.7.1 A wonder of the ancient world, the Great Library of Alexandria was an edifice the corridors of which housed the papyrus scrolls that were the sum total of written knowledge of the ancient world. The library was constructed in the second century BC by Ptolemy I, who ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great. Unlike Alexander, whose conquests were tangible and bloody, producing the greatest empire the world had ever seen, Ptolemy's legacy was a huge archive, a place where the total wisdom of mankind could be gathered, preserved, and disseminated. The Alexandria was partially destroyed in 47 BC when fire spread from Julius Caesar's ships ablaze in the harbour. It was further damaged by Aurelian in 272, and then was finally demolished by Emperor Theodosius's Christians in an anti-paganism riot in 391 AD. (Twelfth-century Christians rewrote this history as an apocryphal account of the Arab General Amr destroying the library out of Koranic zeal.) Even after it was completely destroyed, the Library of Alexandria remained a legendary testimonial to the immense human drive to gather and codify knowledge.

5.7.2 Ambitions to collect and archive all of human knowledge are alive and well today in the private sector as well as in universities. The private sector is focusing primarily on collecting images, thus laying down the foundation for the future museum and commerce systems for art. Universities, on the other hand, are putting their efforts towards digitising existing libraries, thereby making all of this information accessible for scholarly work. How and where these efforts will merge will be interesting to follow, particularly in light of Internet 2, which is a joint effort of industry and academia.

5.7.3 Currently there are a significant number of networked projects digitising libraries around the world: The British Electronic Libraries programme is a three-year initiative involving some sixty projects; the G7 nations have launched similar projects; and in the US, the National Digital Library programme has been in the works since 1994. These projects promise to initiate a significant shift in the way information is stored, retrieved, and disseminated. A good example of how broad and ambitious these initiatives have become is the national Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH). This organisation is comprised of sixty eight member organisations representing museums, archives, and scholarly societies, the contemporary arts, and information technology. The goal is to create an actively-maintained, international database with "deep data" on the projects developed by a geographically distributed team. Ironically, NINCH is led by Rice University in the US and King's College in the UK, which, together with the dominant language of the Internet, unfortunately reinforces the colonial legacies rather than taking this opportune time to involve marginalised nations in the process.

5.7.4 My personal contact with these efforts was a large-scale digital library project called Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) at UC Santa Barbara. ADL is an ambitious project connected to a larger digital library initiative. Its core is the Map and Image Laboratory of UC Santa Barbara's library, which contains one of the nation's largest map and imagery collections as well as extensive digital holdings. In addition ADL has joined forces with the University of California Division of Library Automation, the Library of Congress, the Library of the US Geological Survey, and the St. Louis Public Library, as well as university research groups including the National Centre for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), an NSF-sponsored research centre established in 1988 with sites at UCSB, SUNY Buffalo, and the University of Maine (all three sites of which are involved in the project); the UCSB Department of Computer Science; the Centre for Computational Modelling and Systems (CCMS); the UC Santa Barbara Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; the Center for Information Processing Research (CIPR); the UC Santa Barbara Center for Remote Sensing and Environmental Optics (CRSEO), a partner in the Sequoia/2000 project; and the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). There is no holding back from involving the private sector, including Digital Equipment Corporation; Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) in Redlands, CA, a developer of spatial data handling software and geographic information systems; ConQuest; and the Xerox Corporation. It is awe inspiring to see how much organisation and resources, how many faculty from a variety of disciplines have a collective drive to create a system that will make data accessible and allow for some type of "control" over access and knowledge networking. If juxtaposed with a few other major efforts to "digitise all of knowledge," one begins to truly wonder what kind of role artists working with information and networks assume and indeed whether they will be able to effect coding or aesthetics in significant ways at all. [top]