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Will we ever find every piece of information contained in every book on the planet, in one place, with one access point, available to everyone with access to a computer?

The idea of a Universal Library has been tossed around for years. A recent article noted that there has been a massive undertaking to scan and index every book known to mankind. Google has its program called Google Books, while Yahoo and Microsoft back the Open Content Alliance. The Internet Archive’s Million Books Project is also moving towards scanning, cataloging & indexing books.

Kevin Kelley, Co-Owner of Wired Magazine, indicates that these projects are moving through over a million books a year; while this sounds impressive, they’re currently through only 5% of the world’s books currently in print.

Beyond books in print, the Universal Library concept theoretically would include every page every created on the net, but how does one recreate blog posts or web pages lost and never to be regained? Should there be a “beginning of time” date for the online and web content. The half-life of the average web page is approximately 2 to 2.5 years. How is that content indexed and kept for posterity?

More than likely, Google and Yahoo have not deleted the millions of pages indexed over the years, so they’d be available. Additionally, the Internet Archive has nearly 55 billion web pages in it’s index, though this is just a fraction of what has been posted since the beginning of the “net.”

The information and technology are available, but the cooperation and “plan” haven’t yet been formed. Creating something on the web is often not about co-operation, it’s about competition; seeing who comes out on top will be interesting.

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