You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book thats ever been published. Books still in print youd have to pay for, but everything elsea collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europewould have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.
At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found. Youd be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, youd be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteableas alive in the digital worldas web pages.
It was to be the realization of a long-held dream. The universal library has been talked about for millennia, Richard Ovenden, the head of Oxfords Bodleian Libraries, has said. It was possible to think in the Renaissance that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge in a single room or a single institution. In the spring of 2011, it seemed wed amassed it in a terminal small enough to fit on a desk.
This is a watershed event and can serve as a catalyst for the reinvention of education, research, and intellectual life, one eager observer wrote at the time.
On March 22 of that year, however, the legal agreement that would have unlocked a centurys worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an international catastrophe. When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians whod had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.
