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We Had to Destroy the Library in Order To Save It
2/8/2007
There are many subplots, one of which is the effort by a handful of old fashioned people to protest or sabotage the work of creating a "librareome" from the collection of the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego. The librareome is being created by the physical destruction of the collection:
In fact this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: First one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder's maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel...." The shredded fragments of books and magazine flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stitched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. Rescued data. BRRRRAP! The monster advanced another foot into the stacks, leaving another foot of empty shelves behind it.
The library itself has recently been rebuilt after the Rose Canyon Earthquake, and one of the more fantastical scenes in the book has the library itself physically moving, walking, sort of, using the various flexibilities and motors of the earthquake-proof new construction.
In the end, the library's contents are destroyed, but the Huertas Librareome Project is defeated (as are plans to rule the earth and control people's thoughts via nanotechnology by a US-centric secret agent, using other people's laboratory space in UCSD's research park to develop a mind-control-like "You Gotta Believe Me" [YGBM] technology). The UCSD library is digitized, but the protesters have slowed the project down enough that a Chinese-backed coalition has managed to use the same technology to put the entire British Library and Museum onto that 128 Petabyte storage card that I mentioned at the beginning.
Ah. Robert peeked at the top directory. It was a little like standing on a very high mountaintop. "So this is...?"
"The British Museum and Library, as digitized and databased by the Chinese Informagical Coalition. The haptics and artifact data are lo-res, to make it all fit on one data card. But the library section is twenty times as big as what Max Huertas sucked out of UCSD. Leaving aside things that never got into a library, that's essentially the record of humanity up through 2000. The whole premodern world."
Robert hefted the plastic card. "It doesn't seem like much."
Tommie laughed. "Well, it's not."
It's not "much," but it is. The book leaves the reader in an interesting place. Looking down into all that data, the history of humanity, seems like standing on a mountaintop, which is a tribute to where we all stand right now as we move into the future. But it's not "much" in light of a rapidly expanding technology that's bringing us to a Technological Singularity with so many questions about what it means and will mean to be a human being.
At least we Boomers can rest assured that Vernor Vinge, that in this world view, college and university campuses are still places that not only exist in 2025, but continue to matter. On the other side of that Singularity, who knows?
Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP).
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