Do you remember the story of the room full
of immortal monkeys typing on typewriters
forever? Eventually they would produce all
works ever written and that would ever be
written. They would capture all truth
but also everything that is false or only
partly true. Were we to walk into such a
place we would be confronted with an
ultimate challenge: How to tell that
which was true from everything else in
this ultimate library?
In some ways, the contents of the
Internet and especially the World
Wide Web pose a similar challenge.
About half the world’s population is
now online according to estimates by
the International Telecommunication Union.a These approximately 3. 8
billion people produce enormous
quantities of information on Web
pages, in databases, in social media,
and other online platforms. While I
do not mean to suggest these Inter-nauts are no better than monkeys
typing at random, there is a great
deal of misinformation mixed in
with very high-quality content. Some
of that misinformation is a consequence of ignorance, but some is deliberately produced disinformation
intended to confuse or to bend public opinion to achieve questionable
ends. Ironically, some of the best
quality, highly endorsed information
is also wrong, not out of malevolent
intent, but because it has been invalidated by the scientific method: theory, experiment, and measurement
leading to proof or refutation.
If we are honest with ourselves, sci-
ence is, at best, an approximation of
a https://www.voanews.com/a/more-than-half-
the-world-s-population-is-using-the-inter-
net/ 4692926.html
reality. Even when they are not quite
right, some theories can still be very
useful. Newton’s laws are useful for
many computations but under condi-
tions of acceleration, high-speed or in-
tense gravity, one needs Einstein’s re-
finements. And when we get to the
ultra-small, we must move to quantum
theory, but it doesn’t account for gravi-
ty! The challenge for us is to know un-
der what conditions the approxima-
tions are applicable.
How does all this apply to libraries? Libraries are organized accumulations of information. I almost wrote
“knowledge” but that term seems to
connote “truth” and we know now
that all information is not true. As we
accumulate more and more information, how can we curate this content
so as to correctly distinguish truth
from fiction? How do we cope with
the discovery that what we thought
was true is, in fact, false in the light of
new information? Librarians have a
role to play here as keepers of knowledge, but even they cannot be expected to be omniscient. What about digital content? What about online
content? Can the curators of knowledge use online digital libraries to
maintain and curate content, helping
the users of the library to find truth
and reject fiction (except, perhaps,
when looking for entertainment)?
The task of curating the Internet’s
contents is well beyond any one per-
son’s ability, or even any particular
group. If we are to curate this content,
we will need widespread collabora-
tion, some of it with automated tools
based on AI and machine learning.
The libraries of the future cannot
merely be catalogs of digital (and older
media) content. The objects in the digital library will need to interact in some
fashion so that truth value of their contents can be adjusted as new knowledge becomes available and is absorbed into the library. Such a process
may actually prove feasible for factual
knowledge but even there, fact can be
elusive. Just as relativity theory shows
us that two observers of the same two
events may legitimately disagree as to
the order in which these events occurred, it is not always clear what is
factual and what is speculation.
All this tells us is that persistent
accumulation of knowledge requires
care and curation over time. One
might even imagine that digital online libraries might have the ability to
update themselves as new knowledge
is added. John McCarthyb once said
to me, “Do you know, 100 years from
now they will say, ‘ 100 years ago they
had books that didn’t talk to each
other!’” It will be an enormous task to
devise methods to accumulate and
curate digital content and its relevant
metadata including provenance and
validity. Will computer, information,
and library science be up to the task?
We can but try.
b 1971 ACM A.M. Turing Award honoree.
Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist
at Google. He served as ACM president from 2012–2014.
Copyright held by author.
Libraries Considered Hazardous
DOI: 10.1145/3302508 Vinton G. Cerf