History of the World Library 2040-2090

Key note speech to the IGeLU Conference in Berlin
Michael von Cotta-Schonberg, Deputy Director General, the Royal Library, Univertisy of Copenhagen
[Note: this is live-blogged and is an imperfect representation of the excellent talk - hopefully it will give some sense of what has been presented]

The major governing idea of this presentation is that modern technology will eventually make the traditional library obsolete. Literature will totally migrate to the e-format and a new library culture will develop to handle this situation.

This is a 50 year Jubilee address of the President of the World Library (WL) to the members of the board, whom you represent. You will have to vote on a crucial issue.

My part is to give a brief overview of the Jubilee in 2090. Before the establishement of the WL in 2040, there were institutions called libraries fom latin or bibliothek from Greek. Let's have a brief look at it.

Prehistory of the WL. We leave that to ther Holyness Popess Benedicta the 18th, it was recognised words also have to be written and read not only spoken. They had to invent something to write with and to write on. The oldest texts in the world were written on clay. The first known library was Ashurbanipals palace in Ninive. For thousend of years they used the skin of calves, the invented printing which is a process to reproduce text and images on a support. That was to be short lived, lasting about 500 years. During that period literature was a scarce commodity, due to difficulty of access to books. the solution to the problem is almost as ancient as books themselves, and that is the library. Libraries as a solution to the scarcity problem was so efficient that they proliferated. There were libraries everywhere in the Middle Ages. When books became more of a mass product, libraries were everywhere including in Universities and even nations had their own libraries. But as book produciton became cheaper, more and more people bought books and had their own library. Mostly, books would never be read or never read again - not very efficient...

So within one generation the whole world literature was digitised. E-books had their own distribution systems. E-book publishers kept their books on their own servers because they wanted to protect their own income and services. But Google made them cheaply available on the internet. A period of transition at the beginning of the 21st Century but people weren't aware of it. A great part of non-fiction literature was produced by public money, sold to private companies who would then sell them even more expensive. The cost of this double system was enormous and wouldn't allow to develop the new e-based system. Academics tried to invent new systems with the support of national governments. But academics didn't have the strength to break the monopoly of the great repository institutions and that meant that sometimes double-costs were paid for content that universities had themselves produced.

Google was the solution! In 2035 they made an offer to the UN to turn over all its assests to the Library under one condition that the new library would be called the World Library. This idea was much older it had been thought by HG Wells he called it the World Brain but it's more than a microfilm. Of course Google's offer raised opposition but by that time Europeana and other counterparts grew so important that they had enough say. Opposition was overcome and the WL was approved by the UN in 2040.

Mrs Pippa was the fisrt president and the first to receive a rejuvenation procedure as those became available in the 30's. The WL shouldn't be a centre of texts, but a networkded structure given free and easy online access to texts of all kinds stored on servers belonging to the owners, would provide free access to the content of institutions, libraries and organisations that decided to join the WL. Those were given contributing partnernsihps and voting rights. At the outset the WL didn't own the collection of literature except the collection belonging to Google but was giving access. It was one global network where each collection partner was giving access to the whole world. It was a dounting task. Legal and formalist problems had to be solved. Financial issue was ok because Google gave a huge grant for 25 years.

By 2050 the technological and organisational network was in place. But then crises struck. A small village in Paraguay lived in splendid isolation from the world at large, but the community grew and proclaimed the overthrough of a civilisation that was corrupt and this included the WL. The group was lead by Raoul. They appeared to be healthy and happy so the government left them alone but this was a mistake. On Jan 1 2051 they launched an attack on the system of the WL, a virus that crashed the whole system and it was closed for 2 months causing absolute havoc. One of the most contributing University's digitised content was lost as the person who owned the key to access died. It was therefore necessary to take backups of all the content of the WL. In the end it was dcicded that copies should be deposited by all members. It was costing a fortune but was more efficient than using unsafe procedures. In 2060, the WL had ceased to be a collecitng network but was a central library not for use but for security.

The hacker problem was solved effectively. Every year the WL organised a competition invinting hackers to break into the library. The best one would get a very well paid job for the WL. Only twice the library was hacked but due to the safety copying it wasn't disatrous. Gradually the WL regained its credibility. It would also comprise commercialy produced literature. Print on demand copies could be ordered and this gave a special niche industry for the publishers. Legal Deposit of printed literature had been replaced by Legal Deposit of e-literature. However this was only allowed in the member libraries own reading rooms. Eventually it dawned on the publishers industry that this was obsolete so a petition was made that national libraries had to make this colleciton of e-books available through a price determined by publishers. The authors would get some contribution. The market would be managed by the publishers. The whole procedure was fairly simple and by 2068 the WL was a seller of world literature.

Profits to publishers raised significantly. But the movie and music industry wanted to be included. By 2075, the WL had gained such momentum that those were integrated. The LOE was created = the library of everything. Merging the global web with the WL was an idea that was raised. The discovery department of the WL today is the largest and employs lots of people cleaning the metadata and allowing full seraching texts. Expected to come out with something workable in the next decade. The global publishing system is complicated. For fiction, it is easy for all to enter into the market. Independent publishers flourished as never before. Self publishers overloaded the market but the public got tired of badly written novels. Small scale publishing has by now become a viable industry only if you're not in it for big profits. About 100 years ago many thought this century would see the death of the book. Untrue. Faboulus take off together with the age of the computer.There are different publishing models. the golden open access system made the temptation to publish more and more articles paied by the authors themselves desireable. This functioned reasonably well but was unsustainable because of the large amount of publications. A new system was developed where the pre-publication peer review only comprising the first part, the assessment of methodological soundness. The assessment of scholarly importance was left to new forms of post-publication peer review. This made the publishing run more smoothly but the post-publication peer-reviewing didn't work so well. This meant that there was an increasing number of scholarly article methodologically sound but otherwise insignificant.

Something had to happen. In 2081 the board of the WL received a request to develop an administrative system for all new scholarly publications govering the field of the Nobel Price for A. eminent scientific contribution, B. Valuable scientific contribution or C.accebtable scientific contribution. Would only be a small fee for scholarly publication. The WL created a list of quality publications.

In a very short time the first thing you looked at was the profile of quality certification obtained for a publication rather than the work of the author itself. Quality insurance was taking over by scholarly associations that they had initially introduced years ago. This was the 4th crises of the WL, the most controversial. The proposal now is that world citizens should have direct connection with the WL for retrieveal of data directly into the brain. Using technologies and interface developed by the Kulu organisation. The technology has been proven. 3-dimensional spider in the mind, allowing to look in all directions at once and having text pictures and sound all together. The programm can inject new knowledge in the brain. Voting options are:

1. The world needs to know about the WL's efforts to make available to all knowledge without profit. If yes, it's giving access to knowledge in its fundamental sense. The emprires of the futures and the empires of the mind. So giving our brains to the sum of human knowledge is the best way. By accepting direct unmediated knowledge you will support a new knowledge order and thus a new world based on the right to knowledge. Individuals will achieve a higher level of intelligence. You can steer in any direction you choose. Please vote yes.

2. The risks outweighs the benefits for two reasons. Risk of 2-way communication between the library and human brains. We cannot garantee that we can avoid partial publication between brain and library. the consequences of a massive intelligence computer system are unclear. The second question concerns security. Library computers can be breached this would give hackers the ability to upload data to human brains. This could be to force you to buy new products or programming autonomous funcitons in the brain and this could lead to the complete colapse of human civilisation.

Now it is for the members of the board of the WL to vote.  The motion has been defeated! God save us all. Maybe librarians were wondering if the Libraries had a future. It had a great one. It will lead up to the fulfilment of the great library but the defining moment was the transition to the ubiquitous digital library. National libraries have survived to preserve and make national/historical collections available to the community. After the WL came to being most public libraries were integrated into cultural services under many different names. The professions of librarians is glorious. We are excellent researchers.

The past is an everchanging theatre of interpretation; the future is a stormy sea of potentialities; only the present stands firm but it just lasts a second... Fortunately!