Libraries, have, of course, a foot in real space and a foot in the virtual world. Of interest to me is the way in which we can view them as being not presences, as not agencies (in the sense that I have a presence or an agency when I describe myself in Facebook.) That is something that people have and the marketing arms of organisations largely fake. Libraries do fake a voice, a presence; (often compellingly) but this turns away from their actuality. They are brokers, distributors, processors. They organise the baseline and they populate it with value, sometimes value derived from their users. And they don't use real space to do it.

Let me iterate this point a little. Libraries do offer a presence in their community, and they do create cohesion and potentiality by offering lots of interesting stuff and a place to do it in. (Points which should recommend them as augmented and as social sites). There is a decidedly human aspect to all this. But they offer something more which underlies all of this. They offer bibliographic space that does not depend on the metaphor of actual space as an organising principle. The scholarly space begins with a single work which takes on the structural dimensions of narrative: largely chronological and mappable fairly easily. But as soon as a footnote or a citation appears, that impression is revealed as a misconception, as a flatland, as lacking the dimensionality of the social that inheres in each work.

That is why a library makes us think of a world. It has boundaries we can never reach, potentiaities we can never realise, horizons we can never catch up with. Each work in it describes a reality that is rapidly augmented by its explicit or implicit commentary on others. When early hypertext systems arrived they began to capture some of this in a more mechanised form, but it merely reflects what is already apparent.

How is this relevant to the 'facets of contemporary practices of knowledge and society' I've described above? Does the library offer anything other than a pool to digitise from, to unravel, to transliterate into other forms? I'd begin by saying yes, but I'd pause by adding that that unravelling and reweaving is no mean task, it is one that awaits the completion of the works of criticism and literature and bibliography (and all the other reflective disciplines) as complete sciences. That is, the tapestry is not complete until we know, conclusively, everything there is to know about every book in the library in relation to everything else they might possibly have to do with, as well as each other. I don't know whether Sisyphean or Borgesian is the correct adjective here. But at any rate, tremendous value is inherent in the project, but it is an impossible one to complete. Even if Google books ingests every bit of print in existence, the 'meaning of the library' will not be finished with. Indeed, it serves only to clarify the value that exists beyond the physical apparatus of what is there on the shelves.

To be continued…