No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2019
In his 1956 film, Tout la mémoire du monde (All the memory of the world), French director Alain Resnais turned the black and white documentary footage of an automated retrieval system at the Bibliothèque Nationale into an ominously noire work. The film depicts an enormous open space criss-crossed with a matrix of metal rails. A robotic unit moves through it with eerie precision, its mechanism stopping to pull a book in crude imitation of a human motion. The tone has more in common with that of Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962) than with any cheerful ‘Let's go to the library’ educational pitch. After all, this is a library into which no one can go. A fully machinic world, its combination of nineteenth-century technology and twentieth-century managerial aspirations eliminates human presence as part of its pre-steam-punk dystopianism.
1. The entire short film is available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0RVSZ_yDjs Accessed March 13, 2019.
2. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/thomas-jeffersons-library/overview.html Accessed March13, 2019.
3. Day, Ronald, The Modern Invention of Information (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001)Google Scholar and Indexing it All (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
4. Zhixian Yi, “History of Library Developments in China,” IFLA, WLIC 2013 http://library.ifla.org/143/1/164-yi-en.pdf Accessed March 13, 2019.
5. The W3C report from 2005 is a start point for studying the aspirations of these systems, with many up-to-date initiatives working to make use of existing data and metadata in creative ways. See: https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/DraftReportWithTransclusion for the history and https://www.ld4l.org/linked-data for current discussions. Both accessed March 13, 2019.