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There is much ado these days about the preservation of the Web for future historians. Microsoft's Nathan Myhrvold, WAIS's Brewster Kahle, and others are making the case that since most of the information on the Web is fleeting (the average document lasts 75 days, according to Kahle), it's vital that we take frequent archival snapshots.
They're right, of course. It will be invaluable for historians 50 and 500 years from now to surf the Web as it existed in 1997. We have at least that much obligation to future generations.
But we also have an obligation to scholars of today. There's something missing, I believe, from the Myhrvold-Kahle exhortation to treat the Web as a conspicuous intellectual resource. What's missing is the World Wide Library.
The World Wide Library should be a regimented, filtered, ultra-reliable segment of the World Wide Web. What the WWW is to society - a cheap, frictionless, ageographical counterpart - the WWL would be to physical libraries. All the great (and not so great) physical libraries of the world would come together to share the holdings, as well as the costs, of one enormous digital library. Eventually, the WWL would comprise digitized versions of voluminous paper holdings. (Project Gutenberg has begun this task for literary masterpieces.) But for now, it would simply contain all electronic documents deemed worthwhile.
Emphasis on "worthwhile"; some Web purists will perhaps become inflamed by my proposition that, for purposes of research and scholarship, some sites have more credibility and value than others. In our culture, there is a critical difference between entertainment and education, and though many information providers today profit handsomely from blurring that distinction, the distinction is still an important one to make.
There's a good reason, in other words, why we don't allow billboard advertisements or 57 channels of cable television in conventional libraries and schools. It's the same reason that even well-endowed libraries are choosy about which books and periodicals are allowed into the system. The reason is that we construct our intellectual infrastructure on a foundation of critical thinking and discrimination. We better ourselves by learning how to say "no."
So online dissertations on Faulkner would be allowed into the WWL; online video arcades would not; Human Genome Project reports would be allowed in; Microsoft Sidewalk would not. The New York Times review of my book, Data Smog, would be allowed in; the online HarperCollins advertisement for my book would not. The WWL would also screen for redundancy. There wouldn't be 12 sites offering local weather updates when just one would do.
Order is another essential component in the serious exchange of ideas. Yahoo may work well as a casual guide to the online smorgasbord; it does not suffice as an online card-catalog for people who would use the Web as a library. The WWL would ruthlessly organize the documents it admits. When a researcher typed "weather" into the WWL search engine, she wouldn't get 16,000 hits. She would get one hit: the Weather file, which would contain the subfiles "history of," "science of," "literature on," and "current weather reports."
If she typed in "rain" or "precipitation" or "tornado," she would not get a listing of every document that mentions these words. Instead, she would get the Weather file, followed by any relevant subfiles and sub-subfiles. The point is that structure matters. Libraries not only help us find things, they also benevolently force upon us common principles of organization.
The WWL, in other words, would be the methodical, disciplined yang to the WWW's psychedelically chaotic yin. Not only would all WWL documents be organized, they would also be dated and sourced in a unified manner. On the upper left-hand corner of every document admitted to the WWL would be the original date of publication, all dates of modification, the designer's name, the document's source of funding, and the name of the actual person taking responsibility for the information contained therein.
Also, all WWL documents would be permanent, so that researchers could revisit a document as many times and for as many years as they wished, and so that - this is absolutely crucial - writers could use WWL citations in their work with the assurance that the electronic cites would stand the test of time. For example, if I wanted to write a book about Bill Gates' buying spree of the digital rights to many important historical works of art, I would need to cite Steve Silberman's terrific Packet column, which details how Gates bought Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
I would propose Silberman's article for inclusion in the WWL (if it weren't already included) and, rather than cite the possibly impermanent HotWired URL, cite the permanent WWL URL. Fifty years from now, my great-grandchild the technology historian could read my book and follow my citation to Steve's original article online.
My WWL proposal is not meant to be an argument for keeping full-scale Web access out of public libraries. In addition to providing founts of scholarship, public libraries serve a crucial civic function: They allow people without many resources to take advantage of a myriad of news, art, entertainment, and commerce. Let the separate discussion continue about how best to provide Web access to the needy.
But let us not become distracted from this other important matter of how to finally achieve what H. G. Wells envisioned a half-century ago as the "World Brain." It would be, wrote Wells, "a standing editorial organization ... [that] would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world. It would be alive and growing and changing continually under revision, extension, and replacement from the original thinkers in the world everywhere."
For all its virtues, the Web is not the World Brain that Wells imagined. Nor is it likely to become so in the future. But the World Brain is within our grasp. A well-trained staff of cyberlibrarians could sift through the Web and produce it for us. This won't come for free, of course. But whatever the annual cost - US$10 million? - the global sharing of the costs and global reaping of rewards would make the WWL an astonishing bang for the buck.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
