A Hiroshima regret helped inspire the idea of the digital library
Vannevar Bush had backed research behind the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. After seeing the destruction, he imagined the Memex, a desk with two screens and a keyboard giving rapid access to stored books and files, a machine meant to show that technology could build understanding rather than ruin.
The dream is older still. In 1895 Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine began the Mundaneum, an attempt to catalogue all the world's knowledge in the hope of promoting world peace. Bush described his Memex in the 1945 essay As We May Think, and in 1956 the Ford Foundation funded J. C. R. Licklider to study how technology could improve libraries; his later book Libraries of the Future sketched a networked procognitive system built from a corpus of knowledge, a question and an answer. Such visions were largely realised a century after Otlet, during the internet's great expansion.
Practical progress began with the catalogue. Online Public Access Catalogs had replaced card drawers in many academic, public and specialist libraries by the 1980s, which made sharing between libraries far easier. The education database ERIC, created in 1964 and put online through DIALOG in 1969, is an early digital library. The phrase itself caught on after 1994, when a $24.4 million initiative backed by the NSF, DARPA and NASA funded projects at six American universities, including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley. Unlike Bush's Memex, which gathered everything at one researcher's desk, networked collections can stay scattered and be fetched on demand.
Collections mix born-digital material, such as word processor files and social media posts, with digitised copies of paper and photographs. Some, like arXiv and the Internet Archive, double as long-term archives; the Digital Public Library of America pools content from many institutions; American Memory sits inside the Library of Congress. Legal deposit rules, which require copies of every published work to go to a national library, have been rewritten for electronic formats, as Australia did in 2016. The British Library and the German national library restrict digital deposits to their reading rooms, while Australia's system lets the public read most material remotely.
The idea has even reached video games. The Uncensored Library, built inside Minecraft, distributes banned books around the world, including to players in places where those texts are censored.
Source: Digital library
