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	The Library of Babel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		"The Library of Babel" (Spanish: La biblioteca de Babel) is a short story by Argentine author (and librarian) Jorge Luis Borges, conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books that can be composed in a certain character set.
		The story repeats the theme of Borges's 1939 essay "The Total Library" ("La biblioteca total"), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story "The Universal Library" ("Die Universalbibliotek").
		The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Library_of_babel (614 words)

	The Virtual Library of Babel
		An academic library is an attempt to provide an organized approach to an infinite universe, just as a liberal arts education provides a setting and a curriculum designed to ground students in a realm of knowledge that is changing and boundless.
		And libraries end up subscribing to a lot of materials that have nothing to do with the curriculum they exist to support because the market—all libraries of all types—welcomes materials that are not ones you’d have found in a liberal arts college library in the past.
		The library, as its commons, is a place where students can develop fluency in the multiple discourses that give rise to new knowledge and, with practice, find their own voice and join in the conversation.
	homepages.gac.edu /~fister/VirtualLibrary.html (4870 words)

	Amazon.com: The Library of Babel (Pocket Paragon): Books: Jorge Luis Borges,Erik Desmazieres,Andrew Hurley,Angela Giral (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		The first-person narrator is one of the library's residents.
		The story of the Library of Babel is told from the inside, by a librarian who in his youth explored thousands of the galleries and rooms of the limitless institution, but is now content to stay close to the home shelves.
		Although Desmazieres' Library appears to be physically bounded in a way that Borges' Library is not (there is no "outside" for Borges), the etchings present a magisterial universe that by the overwhelming size and fine detail of its rooms evokes a sense of the infinite in the same way that High Gothic cathedrals function.
	www.amazon.com /Library-Babel-Pocket-Paragon/dp/156792123X (1821 words)

	Digital Implementation of the Library of Babel
		Ascii allows more symbols than the 25 used by the Library of Babel, but is more convenient to use and avoids the effort of defining a new characterset.
		The library is too densely populated and even leaving one bit out of the full-text results in non-unique matches.
		This optimization does not work for ordinary libraries as they might or might not contain a book but the Library of Babel is assured to have any book.
	www.techuser.net /babel.html (890 words)

	The Library Of Babel
		The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.
		Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born.
		They speak (I know) of the ``feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.'' These words, which not only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their authors' abominable taste and desperate ignorance.
	astraldustbin.elit.net /borgesbabel.htm (2514 words)

	Daylight Atheism > How Big is the Library of Babel?
		However, Borges' most iconic short story is the one called "The Library of Babel", less a narrative with a plot than an extended thought experiment, about a race of people who live in a cosmos that is bizarre indeed.
		As Borges' narrator explains, the people of the Library of Babel have finally discerned the nature of their world, based on two observations: first, that every book uses the same twenty-five symbols for letters and punctuation; second, that no traveler has ever come across two exactly identical books.
		Though it is obvious that the Library of Babel must be vast, I did not appreciate just how vast it is until reading Daniel Dennett's discussion of it in Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
	www.daylightatheism.org /2006/03/how-big-is-the-library-of-babel.html (1946 words)

	Babel
		The significance of having such a library is greater than a collection of all of the world’s most important literary works that have been or will be written, translated into every conceivable language.
		It should be obvious that this library could never exist due to the sheer enormity of not only the structure itself, but also the amount of materials and man-hours it would take to create the books.
		Using this library as a metaphor for the Universe is a slight understatement.
	www-rohan.sdsu.edu /dept/drwswebb/lore/1_3/babel.htm (2471 words)

	Borges - Papers: "Library of Babel on the Internet"
		The infinite library is presented from the viewpoint of one of its denizens, “los hombres de la Biblioteca” (“the men of the Library”), who was born in the library, has spent his life among the bookstacks, and knows he will die within its walls.
		The virtual library now evolving in cyberspace differs from any previous library real or imaginary, Alexandria or Babel – because it is also the creation of its readers.
		The great library that is the Internet is continually expanding, and that expansion is the work of its ordinary, common readers as much as anyone else.
	www.themodernword.com /borges/borges_papers_rollason2.html (1892 words)

	About the Project
		The Library Project is an installation of artworks that explore the nature of the library—its vastness, its proliferation, and the peculiarities of its organization.
		The Library Project began in the Fall of 2001 as a credited, three-student tutorial with James Jacobus '03, Myra Rasmussen '04, and Aki Sasamoto '04 under the auspices of the Christian Johnson Foundation.
		Because the library is now so large and complex a universe unto itself, and so influential on our perception and thought, there appears to be a reversal at work—the world now becomes an index to the library.
	thelibraryproject.wesleyan.edu /about.html (268 words)

	The Library of Babel and The Garden of Forking Paths (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		The Library of Babel and The Garden of Forking Paths have quite a few similarities, and yet there are many differences.
		The Library of Babel is quite different in the aspect that it speaks of books in a different manner.
		The Library states at the end that the "library is limitless and periodic and that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder"(87).
	a.parsons.edu /~cara/babel.html (531 words)

	CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Tower of Babel
		The descendants of Noe had migrated from the "east" (Armenia) first southward, along the course of the Tigris, then westward across the Tigris into "a plain in the land of Sennar".
		The position of Babil within the limits of the ancient Babylon agrees with the Biblical location of the tower; the name Babil itself may be regarded as a traditional relic of the name Babel interpreted by the inspired writer as referring to the confusion of tongues.
		The only indication of the time at which the Tower of Babel was erected, we find in the name of Phaleg (Genesis 11:10-17), the grandnephew of Heber; this places the date somewhere between 101 and 870 years after the Flood.
	www.newadvent.org /cathen/15005b.htm (1118 words)

	Journal One: "Affordances and Design" and "The Library of Babel" (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		If “The Library of Babel” is inspected in light of “Affordances and Design,” by Don Norman, we can see these affordances more clearly and continue to try to understand some of Borges's ideas.
		People are afforded the ability to travel infinitely throughout the library and gain all possible knowledge, but they do not know the design well enough or have the medium required in order to perform these actions.
		If something in the library were out of order, you would never be able to find it again, it could get lost among all of the other books.
	www.arches.uga.edu /~linz5387/journal1.html (581 words)

	The Library of Babel (Discussion Article)
		Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges presented such an idea in his short story The Library of Babel, one of his brushes with the genre of SF that displays his masterful ability to comment on the human condition.
		The universe as a vast library, with man the imperfect librarian.
		The Library of Babel is an incredible story, and one that I will n...
	www.suite101.com /article.cfm/6513/84563 (328 words)

	The Library of Babel
		So the library contains "Hamlet", millions of near copies of "Hamlet" with slight errors, and countless number of texts with the "To be or not to be" soliloquy intact, but otherwise complete garbage.
		At the "Grey Labyrinth" we've just gotten hold of several betas of CD ROMs purporting to be "The Library of Babel Now On CD-ROM".
		CD-ROM 4 claims a "more than complete Library"; in addition to all possible 410 page texts, it also boasts a reference section with a finite number of unique books of infinite length (really thin pages, you can just keep turning and turning...).
	www.greylabyrinth.com /puzzles/puzzle.php?puzzle_id=puzzle023 (464 words)

	The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges
		This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books.
		At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity’s basic mysteries—the origin of the Library and of time—might be found.
	www.101bananas.com /library/librarybabel.html (2715 words)

	The Library of Babel (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		The existence of the Library was revealed in the middle of the XXe century by a librarian, Jorge Luis Borges.
		(Nota: because of the nature of books of the Library of Babel, only recent digitalizations are available on line).
		Each book of the Library consists of 410 pages, each one of 40 lines of 80 signs.
	hamete.org /babel/index_en.html (128 words)

	Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
		[1] This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books.
		At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity’s basic mysteries — the origin of the Library and of time — might be found.
		Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast Library is useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would be sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, containing an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves.
	www.analitica.com /bitblioteca/jjborges/library_babel.asp (2757 words)

	[hamete.org] Library of Babel (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		The short story of Jorge Luis Borges "The Library of Babel" describes an endless library.
		All the books of this library obey to the same rules: same number of pages, same character set,...
		The following pages are an attempt to publish in digitalized form all the content of the Library of Babel.
	hamete.org /things/lbabel.html (52 words)

	A Private Library
		The Virtual Library (which is dead) is often spoken of as a vast public facility, containing all the world's information, and doubtless some inadequately attended rest rooms as well.
		Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite.
		Confessions, the one done for the Oxford Movement's "Library of the Fathers" by E.B. Pusey.
	ccat.sas.upenn.edu /jod/private.library.html (1184 words)

	babel
		Well besides the fact that we are accepting library related photos, art, poetry and fiction, the main difference is our #1 policy: Everyone is accepted.
		However, The Library of Babel is going to be an experiment in the other direction.
		If in the end all we have are scans of old men mooning in the stacks, and cheesy poems about the dewey decimal system, then oh well....but we know you can do better than that.
	www.geocities.com /azitiz/babel.html (338 words)

	MathFiction: The Library of Babel (Jorge Luis Borges)
		MathFiction: The Library of Babel (Jorge Luis Borges)
		Get past the religious metaphors, and you'll find bare-knuckle mathematics, e.g., `The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.' Sure to warm the prefrontal cortex of anyone who's ever pondered measurement demarcation problems in extrinsic and intrinsic geometry.
		It is a perfect illustration of the notion of universal covering of the torus, and I have always been tempted to continue: of course, if it is illimited, every book appears an infinite number of times, and the destruction of a particular copy of a book is unimportant.
	math.cofc.edu /faculty/kasman/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf254 (477 words)

	Jorge Luis Borges
		His father, of Italian, Jewish, and English heritage, was a lawyer and a psychology teacher, who demonstrated the paradoxes of Zeno on a chessboard for his son.
		The never-ending process of cataloguing inspired one of Borges's most famous short stories, 'The Library of Babel' (1941), in which the faithful catalog of the Library is supplemented with "thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog".
		In 'The Library of Babel' the symmetrically structured library represents the universe as it is conceived by rational man, and the library's illegible books refers to man's ignorance.
	www.kirjasto.sci.fi /jlborges.htm (2488 words)

	The Doric Column - millennium II redux, Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, symbolic analysts, George Gilder, the ...
		After all, he was a mythmaker who gradually went blind and who wrote in the basement of a library, the National Library in Buenos Aires.
		Even libraries, the fonts of knowledge, are now beginning to occupy the technological space trafficked by the symbolic analysts, the knowledge workers.
		In that fable the former cataloger of the octagonal National Library describes an imaginary library consisting of a universe of infinite hexagonal galleries of bookshelves containing all books--unbounded space at the service of knowledge.
	mbbnet.umn.edu /doric/library.html (2223 words)

	From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections
		The pages of the library's books seem to contain random sequences of letters and spaces; occasionally a few intelligible words emerge in the sea of paper and ink.
		Borges's nightmare, of course, is a cursed vision of the research methods of disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy, where the careful reading of books, one after the other, is supposed to lead inexorably to knowledge and understanding.
		In other words, high-quality digitization and thorough text markup may be attractive for those creating digital collections, but a familiarity with information theory and data-mining techniques makes one realize that it may be more worthwhile to digitize a greater number of books or documents at a lower standard for the same cost.
	www.dlib.org /dlib/march06/cohen/03cohen.html (3112 words)

	What Google promises us - Salon
		An infinite library, full of everything that is, and will be.
		It may seem quixotic to see the blueprint of this library (which, in Borges' story, regularly drove men insane as they sought fruitlessly for the one true book that would explain everything) written between the lines of a Google press release.
		As an undergraduate I spent many happy hours in the stacks of the main library at the University of Michigan -- one of the first libraries to participate in Google's plan.
	dir.salon.com /story/tech/col/leon/2004/12/14/google/index.html (514 words)

	The Library of Babel (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		The Library of Babel by Jorge Jose Borges
		In an attempt to explain the nature of chaos in our universe (the Library) Borges suggests we examine the multitude of books (writings) in an attempt to find a common thread, idea.
		Of course, the analogy of the Library of Babel can apply to the way the Internet (www) has evolved as a new space.
	a.parsons.edu /~teufel/interface/babel.html (218 words)

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