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Dr. Jacob Soll: My research is actually the cultural origins of the information state
or the world of information. I'm trying to understand not only the origins of that, but
also how the dynamic works. Who the people were who were asking these kinds of questions,
what kinds of tools were they using? What interests me in these libraries is what we
get are sights of what I call sedimentary knowledge. What it means is that many of the
libraries come together in both rational and irrational ways. So, knowledge, let's say
a radical philosopher might not meet with a churchman. But, you can go to the library
and find their books together. The library's going to be a funny place where they interact
and the librarian is often the middle person, the middleman between the radical and the
conservative. Up until the 18th century, people didn't really build free standing libraries.
So, the building of libraries is probably the first large-scale cultural building campaign
that we've ever seen in the west. Libraries are going to be the place that you can go
to to get information, as I've said, that you can't necessarily get by having a face
to face conversation with somebody. These libraries are not exactly like the web, but
they're information centers, there's just one thing that they still have that the web
doesn't have. They've got people in them and those people are often, can bring you more
than a search engine. They can connect you to someone, they can tell you a secret, so
it's very, very important, not just the information bank, but the people who are in the information
banks. It's not historically accurate to call this the birth of the search engine, but it's
really interesting to see these catalogues go from books that are listed by the old topics
of education, for example theology, to books that are listed under topics and then the
topics expand to include from theology to mathematics to geography to history to industry
to agriculture. So, they're going to expand the topics, but they're also going to make
them alphabetical, they're going to make them usable. Libraries are going to so important,
as I said, they become central to the enlightenment. We know that. The reason I'm writing this
book is no one's tried to at least pull it all together. I'm not going to hit library,
I'm not going to be able to, you know, get everything in there, but I'm going to give
a sense of how they worked during this key moment in human history, and what I'm finding
is not only were they central to the enlightenment, they're central to, for example, princes start
thinking, I'm going to run my country, as I said, through a library. I'm going to build
industries and castles and empires through good libraries. I think what I have been finding
recently, I've been looking at a library in a kind of dead way, I've made a historical
error initially by looking at Google and Yahoo, then going back and looking at libraries and
what I've been finding is that's an error. I mentioned this early, what I've been finding
is that there are not just books and systems and catalogues and secret boxes, and keys,
and back doorways, but there are people working through these libraries and I'm beginning
to see not only how important libraries are today. There are so many things that Google
and these other things can't do. One of the ways that you can understand how knowledge
works is to literally go in and see the library. I fear that things like Google, they're amazing,
they're great, they're the dream, that these guys had, of these great search engines, I'm
worried that the three dimensional picture isn't there. I'm also worried that libraries
are getting forgotten now in this time of these search engines. They're trying to put
everything on the web, that's fantastic, but you're always behind the residue of the flash,
you're going to need the library, you're going to need physical books and the things that
hold them all together, and the people who know about them.
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