The Scholarly Wing of the Public Cybrary and the Right to Know

Let us imagine that to speak of a cybrary is a way of moving the idea of the library into cyberspace. The cybrary will be enabled by existing technologies and buffeted by new knowledge economies, but it will also be shaped by the legacy of the library. The library has always been a public and private space for bringing together books, ideas, and people. In the case of the English language, this duality and its resulting tension enters very early in the history of the language. The library was private before it was public. In defining the word, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) holds up Chaucer’s reference to “the walles of thi lybrarye” in his book Boethius, circa 1374, as the first published use of the word. And yet, within 75 years of Chaucer’s instance—and still before the invention of the printing press—library was also being used to refer to a place, as the OED defines the second meaning of the word: “containing a collection of books, for the use of the public or of some particular portion of it.” ¹ The clerical and university libraries of medieval times were the first to give library its public sense. It amounted to a limited public, to be sure, who wandered freely among those manuscripts, and such limits form the very theme of this chapter. The element that should most concern us in the ongoing formation of the cybrary, I argue, is the public scope of the scholarly pursuit of knowledge, and what can be done to expand and extend it. ² The library is both public and private in a number of senses; there is a governed and ungoverned quality to the time spent there. What that means in terms of the cybrary is best suggested by a little more etymology on the cyber side of this new coinage.