Lee A. Bygrave (red.) YULEX 2002 - Universitetet i Oslo

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88 Jon Bing
cal concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the
banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations
of data. Like city lights, receding …”
Yet this inner space already existed prior to the time we embarked on the voyage
in cyberspace. For a conventional library is itself such an inner space. Many
of us re-discover in the Internet available at our own desk the joys of our childhood,
when we realized that the library was a multi-universe of possibilities.
We agree that there are vast differences between the traditional technology of
libraries stacked with books, and the hyperlinked cyberspace of Internet. Yet
these obvious differences should not make us blind to the even more important
similarities: They are both a space of knowledge and entertainment, presenting
experiences from around the world to our own laptop, whether a screen of
liquid crystals or the pages of a printed book is resting on our knees. And in
both cases, also, the vessel for travelling is our own marvelous imagination,
which creates images from text or graphics vivid and personal. In a sense, we
are also traveling within our own mind, the innermost and private space in
which the most important events of our life take place.
In a modest way, I have myself tried to express this relation between the
outer space of starships and the inner space of libraries. Having accepted that
the laws of nature, as we know them, prohibit travel faster than light, I asked
myself what would be sufficiently valuable to ship between inhabited worlds
in a possible future of a space-faring humankind, where the starships would
spend generations in transit between inhabited worlds. The answer was obvious:
Knowledge. From this emerged a series of juvenile novels of the voyages
of the starship Alexandria (the choice of name was obvious), staffed by librarians,
bringing the huge data banks of knowledge collected from many
worlds to a new planet. In the novels, the world at which the starship arrived
would always have a problem or conflict. But rather than solving this by
flashguns or novel weaponry, the librarians would search their files, and
come up with a piece of information that provided a solution. This reveals, of
course, my obvious motive for the adventures – the novels do not pretend to
prophesy a possible future, but rather indicate a strategy for the solution of
the conflicts in our own time and societies. Perhaps naively, they plead that
libraries have a role in our present affairs, and that the knowledge, experiences
and insights contained in the inner space of the library vaults also may
provide solutions in our multi-cultural societies: The distance measured in
politics or attitudes between the nations of this world often seems more difficult
to bridge than the distance between solar systems.