ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the recurrent theme of the universal library to draw together the threads of the present book, evoking the theoretical and methodological approaches. It demonstrates how a twenty-first-century debate such as that which erupted over Google’s Book Search project needs to be understood within the frames of competing private and public conceptions of the book, the history of libraries and the relationship between print and digital communication paradigms. The Ur-myth of the universal library, one invariably referenced by any initiative to construct an exhaustive collection of human knowledge, is the classical Library of Alexandria. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were also deeply marked by a universalising impulse to collect and classify knowledge, evidenced in phenomena such as dictionaries, encyclopedias and museums. The vast card catalogues that represented the ‘brain’ of national and academic libraries in the mid-twentieth century had, by the late decades of that century, given way to the first computerised library catalogues.
