Digital Alexandria · on git

This library

The Library of Alexandria tried to hold the books of a world. Microsoft Encarta put an encyclopedia on a disc: shelves, a find box, an article, a picture, a see-also. This git is the third thing: a library you can fork, diff, and host without a corporation’s license or a king’s fire.

We do not have the 400,000 scrolls. We do not have Encarta’s 68,000 articles (and we may not take them). We have the shape, the stacks we actually wrote, and doors into what is already free: the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, Hillsdale’s free courses, MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Yale.

Encarta — the model, not the copy

Encarta (1993–2009) was a multimedia encyclopedia: you picked a shelf, you typed a find, you read an article with related links. It died when the web made a disc look small. Wikipedia took the volume; it did not take the editorial spine. This library takes Encarta’s interface of a book that knows its shelves and fills those shelves with work moored to American history, Latin, Euclid, law as text, and the halls already on this git. We do not ingest Microsoft’s prose. We do not scrape Wikipedia onto GitHub.

Alexandria — the ambition

A library is not a search box over the whole internet. It is a catalog someone is responsible for. catalog.json is that catalog. Add an article by adding a page and a line. The fire that takes a disc or a server does not take a git history in more than one house.

First stacks: the education network, Reform College, civics, STEM, the octavo, the law map (IRAC, California, Arizona — knowledge, not admission), full Latin. Public-domain stacks are doors, not piracy.

Larger than Encarta in one sense only: it can grow without a product cycle, and it can tell the truth about consent, Euclid, and the people without a later social system as the editor. Smaller in every other sense, until the catalog is longer. That is the work. Return to the shelves.