Title: Library of Babel, Jonathan Basile

URL: http://libraryofbabel.info/

Description: "This seed was nominated for archiving by a member of the Georgia Tech community. The nominator provided the following description for the seed: Digital Recreation of Jorge Borges' short story "The Library of Babel" In this information age, we are constantly surrounded by more text, audio and video than we could ever process in one lifetime. But the world wasn't always this way. libraryofbabel.info was created by Jonathan Basile, who built the website as homage to the short story "The Library of Babel" (""La biblioteca de Babel""), written in 1941 by Jorge Luis Borges. The story describes a fantastic library that contains every possible book in existence. Specifically, every possible combination of 410 pages of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks existed somewhere in the incomprehensibly vast library. Everything that had or ever could be written was there. However, because the library contained every possible combination of symbols, the vast majority of books were gibberish. Indeed, the woeful librarians went mad trying to find ""The Catolouge"", the book which would tell them how to find all other meaningful books in the library (such a book must exist, if every possible combination of 410 pages is in the library). The website itself is much more inviting than a near-infinite labyrinth of library rooms. A user is invited to browse the library of babel however he or she pleases, through a clean, modern web aesthetic that directs all of your attention to the books on the otherwise white monitor. However, the website makes an impossible claim: to contain every single book in the library of babel. How is this possible? The website uses a ""reversible hash function"", which can map any input to a random number, and map the number back to the original string. Therefore, the website's servers themselves don't have to store a single one of the pages (which is good, because there are more possible pages than atoms in the universe). Instead, when a user asks for a random page, a random number is generated, fed into the hash function, and a page comes out. An important note is that it will always be the same page that comes out if you use the same number. One might now complain, saying that the great library is just a technological illusion, not an infinite source of knowledge. However, the library never claimed to have knowledge, it only claims to have books. It is up to us to decide whether or not to search for meaning within. Even though the inner working of the library are very simple, it stands as a testament to a time when all website were individual works of effort, and webmasters spent years building site to reflect their hobbies, interests, and desires. To this extent, the library succeeds in showing us the web at it's best: as a place to create, browse, and wonder. I am well aware of the technical difficulties involved in archiving this site. Unfortunately, Mr. Basile has implemented his generator on the server side, and therefore it may be impossible to archive it without contacting him, and asking him to move the generator into a JavaScript file loaded with the website in the browser. However, even if we can only save a few pages, the educational power of the website would not be diminished, because curious readers can always read about the history of the site on the information page, and read about others' past explorations in the forums.

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