The Library of Utopia

Libraries are places... as much or even more so than books, their inhabitants. Places inhabited by books and their guardians, visited by readers and other seekers. Special places, real or imagined ~  Borges' Library of Babel, Eco's in the Name of the Rose, the lost Library of Alexandria (which lives in legend and on its own Facebook page, perhaps refound beneath the sea), the new one... others...

Google's ambitious book-scanning program is foundering in the courts. Now a Harvard-led group is launching its own sweeping effort to put our literary heritage online. Will the Ivy League succeed where Silicon Valley failed?

In his 1938 book World Brain, H.G. Wells imagined a time—not very distant, he believed—when every person on the planet would have easy access to "all that is thought or known."