Archivist Has Not Learned of TV Show Hoarders; Tries to Collect Every Book

In a move that would make the Library of Congress blush, archivist Brewster Kahle is attempting to collect a copy of every book in print.  Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, has collected about 500,000 books so far.
Dude, think about this.  Alexandria burned.  The Library of Congress went crazy and decided to collect Twitter, of all things.  Sean Connery and Chrisian Slater had to fight evil monks.  Hoarding books like this cannot end well, trust me.  All you are going to end up with is a warehouse full of crates of books that we will have to play campfire with when the robots take over after the greenhouse effect turns half of us into zombies. 

Heyyyyy... maybe you are on to something, Kahle ole pal...

[courier-journal] has some cool pics of this project, too.

A is for Alexandria

Old School Librarians

The ancient Library of Alexandria was once the library in the world.  At its peak, it held nearly 50,000 scrolls, tablets and other forms of information collected from around antiquity.  Founded by a long succession of Ptolemies in Egypt from the beginning of 3 BCE, the library maintained full collections of not only Greek literature but Greek translations of Mediterranean, Indian, and Middle Eastern items.  The library survived in both a main library in the palace and a "daughter" library in the Temple of Serapis.  The main library was destroyed in late 3 CE by a civil war and the "daughter" library was destroyed in 391 CE by Theophilus, the Bishop of Alexandria.

A new library, the Bibliotheca Alexandria, has been founded in 2002 by the Egyptian government.

So there's the history lesson.  To sum up, lots of folks got together and held bunches of knowledge.  Then government trauma and religion burned it right the hell down.  Live and learn kids.

Britannica
New World Encyclopedia