To understand the purpose and value of libraries and museums we must first look back to another horizon, a much more distant time when human beings emerged from their evolutionary line to assume a commanding position among the creatures of this planet. When we put that picture in mind, then trace slowly forward, it is easy to see that it was our ability to use language and construct pictures that allowed us to climb out of the muck to obtain whatever success we might now lay claim.

From the outset words and pictures provided the manna necessary to shape and discipline our thinking minds, cell by cell and over many thousands of years. With practice and a little inventiveness we were able to shape these expressions into artful forms and complex descriptive systems that in turn made us more effective planners and greatly enhanced our ability to imagine.

As our minds acquired new and increasingly potent creative powers our manipulation of these expressions began to yield more complex layers of information and knowledge -- more than any one mind could hold -- and we had to invent ways to collect and organize them within structured settings. Over time our efforts evolved into those institutions that we now call libraries and museums.

We must, of course, acknowledge the first truly great combined library and museum, that fabulous creation we know as the Library of Alexandria, founded some 2,300 years ago by Alexander the Great in the city of Alexandria on the Egyptian coast. It was there that the model for all libraries and museums was surely set. Alive with the best minds of the age this magnificence was for 700 years the center of intellectual ferment for the western world.

Collected there were manuscripts, maps, and artifacts drawn from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Some estimates put the number of manuscripts alone in excess of 60,000. They included the works of minds attached to persons with names like Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and a hundred more, a thousand more. Among its holdings you would find the roots of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra, perhaps even the beginnings of a calculus. You would learn that Earth is a ball with a circumference of approximately 40,000 kilometers, and get the first inkling that Earth is but a planet among others, part of the Sun system.

And, there at Alexandria, you would have been able to attend lectures and seminars given by the greats of many lands, including the likes of the first woman to be appointed mathematician and philosopher, the free-thinking Hypatia.

Until its destruction in about 400 of the current era there was nothing like it on the planet, so far as we know.

Was it in fact the model for the great universities that would spring up across Europe a thousand years later? Perhaps. Every university worth its name has as its core at least a library, and very often one or more specialized museums.

They are not only sensible things, these libraries and museums, but essential technologies for the preservation and transmission of the collective memory of the species. They allow us to establish a space of almost limitless dimensions, and in that space to establish connections between the most contradictory cultures and conventions, and within them to find the patterns that permit history to come together as a coherent page. And, of course, it is from such coherent pages that we -- the whole of society -- discover the foundations of new knowledge and the impulses for the exercise of our imagination.

With luck they will remain ever works in progress, evolving and expanding as the human story continues to unfold; after all, should it ever become possible to write a concluding line to the human story, all that went before or might occur afterwards could not possibly matter.

Finally, a word about the internet and the worldwide web. There is much talk today about the internet and worldwide web as replacements for our brick and mortar libraries and museums. One day, perhaps, this lofty aim might indeed be achieved. Not yet, though. Not until we have machines and software that can retrieve files of any age, of any format, created on any platform, will they even begin to approach the utility of our brick and mortar institutions. Until the day when we can, with equal ease -- 20 years out, a hundred years out, a thousand years out -- access the works of antiquity as well as the most recent products of the human mind, the internet and worldwide web will remain but a useful appendage, a convenience only as good as the latest iteration of code.

As always, we seem wont to mistake mere newness for progress. If the worldwide web, or whatever comes along to replace it, is to displace the plain utility of the printed book, some very clever boys and girls are going to have to come up with the rosetta stone of all rosetta stones, oblivious of change and the very idea of newness.