Libraries from Babel to Google

25 September 2015

Christopher Prince. Libraries from Babel to Google

Christopher Prince’s lecture summary

Archeologists assert that libraries first appeared along with large urban centres in the Middle East, circa 2500 BC.  This means, as institutions of memory, the library has a 4000 year-old story to tell us about how knowledge is created, curated, conserved and made communal.  Beginning in Ancient Syria’s Archive of Ebla, the talk will chart the spread of libraries to the city-states of Greece and then the Empire of Rome, review the arts of booking-making and librarianship in medieval Christendom and the Islamic Caliphates, then examine the crucial technologies and developments in literacy and education that have led to the emergence of the contemporary, networked library as well as the challenges of virtualized information storage and knowledge capture

Christopher Prince’s bio.

Christopher Prince received his Master’s from McGill’s School of Information Studies in 2001.  He also holds an undergraduate in Contemporary Studies and English Literature. Chris has been a Strategic Policy Analyst with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) since 2007, where he has worked on national security programs, intelligence oversight and surveillance.  Prior to joining the Privacy Commissioner, he was an analyst with the Treasury Board Secretariat on improved parliamentary reporting, and worked with the National Library and Archives of Canada on metadata policies.