My Other Brain is a Library

Last updated: Sun Apr 13 2025

Bricolage

When I was in university, I wandered the stacks of the university library, flipping through volumes at random, building up a mental map of human knowledge via bricolage.

This essay, too, is bricolage. There is no thesis, only a loose set of associations between topics. But through juxtaposition, perhaps a deeper meaning can be obtained.

Follow the links in each section to explore. Some lead outwards. Some spiral inwards.

Etymonline

Per Etymonline, bricolage is “work made from available things” and, by extension, “make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose)”. It further points out that the term bricolage is relatively new, dating to a 1966 work by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. I’m surprised — it always struck me as a solid Middle English term inherited from the Norman overlords.

Etymonline is one of my favorite online resources, a perfect example of Web-as-library.

Coziness

Coziness is an underrated feature of libraries. Because they require no purchase, they are welcome to all, or at least most. The best libraries manage to make every space cozy and inviting.

Library of Alexandria

“We do not lose texts because of catastrophic events that wipe out all copies of them. We lose texts because they stop being copied.” - u/XenophonTheAthenian on r/AskHistorians

Contrary to popular belief, the burning of the Library of Alexandria was not a major event. Even if it had survived, its papyrus-scroll contents would be long-decayed. Maintaining libraries of written works takes, well, work. Libraries can’t be taken for granted.

Curation

There is an art to curation, of which AskHistorians is a perfect example. By strictly enforcing community norms and encouraging certain content, they’ve built a beautiful, passionate community.

Libraries are in the business of archival, and, in theory, everything should be archived. But libraries are secretly in the business of curation, too. It is simply not possible to archive everything, forever. Choices must be made.

That’s especially true for smaller or specialized or personal libraries. Choosing what to archive and what not to can completely change the meaning of a library’s collections.

Happenstance

For many topics about the ancient world, we only know as much as we do because of happenstance. Papyrus mummified by the dry, desiccating heat of Egypt. Clay tablets from the Canaanite city of Ugarit, permanently baked by the fires that destroyed the city as it fell. Bamboo strips of early Daoist texts, buried with long-dead nobles, the string binding them together rotted away, so that we know the content but not the correct order.

Century-Scale Storage

“If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?” That’s the provocative question that opens “Century-Scale Storage”, an almost book-length essay from Maxwell Neely-Cohen at the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab. What techniques would you use?

Think for a moment.

At the end of the essay, Neely-Cohen gives up the trick: “I have mostly been beating around the bush here for 12,000 words. One can make a real argument that storage methods and media are largely irrelevant to survival over such long periods. The success of century-scale storage comes down to the same thing that storage and preservation of any duration does: maintenance. The everyday work of a human being caring for something. If a collection enjoys proper maintenance and care for 400 years, odds are, that collection will survive 400 years. How it is stored will evolve or change as it is maintained, but if there are maintainers, it will persist.”

Librarianship

It’s sometimes forgotten, but libraries are not just stacks of books. Librarianship is also a profession, requiring (for some roles) at least a Master’s, as well as the support of dozens or hundreds of administrative and maintenance staff — a profession in the midst of change, as communities expect ever more services out of their libraries.

Terror

Libraries are not often a source of terror. Isn’t that strange?

The Library of Congress has a mere fraction of the total number of books published, let alone the infinitely infinite library of Borges’ “Library of Babel”, but even the smallest local library has more volumes than one can read in a lifetime. But we don’t often think of that when we’re wandering that stacks.

Ephemerality

Many people take photos almost every day on their smartphones. These photos are dumped into a photo library that likely lives in the cloud. But how many of those photos will ever be looked at again?

Personal Libraries

It can be informative to keep personal libraries. Goodreads is a classic example, or perhaps a Pinterest board, or, for the IndieWeb-minded, Are.na.

Since 2020, I’ve kept logs of every book I’ve read, and eventually added films, albums, and games as well. It’s charming to look back just a few years ago — years that feel so distant already — and remember what topics obsessed me, what novels moved me. I highly recommend it.

Cultural Technology

One of my all-time favorite talks is “Large Language Models as a Cultural Technology” by developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik. In the talk, she argues that we should not consider LLMs as “agents”, but instead as a form of cultural technology akin to… libraries!

Libraries are technology, which allow us to efficiently imitate cultural behaviors, for good or for ill. Like all technologies, they had to be discovered and they have to be maintained.

Controlled Digital Lending

One of the major controversies facing libraries today is Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) — whether libraries can loan digital resources like ebooks in a similar manner to physical materials, or whether they must pay (often onerous) fees for licenses.

Copyright has always made strange bedfellows for libraries, and that’s particularly true for non-traditional libraries like the Internet Archive, who (rightly or wrongly) claimed CDL for their Pandemic Emergency Library lending and lost the lawsuit as a result.

Renaissance

One of the saddest misunderstandings about the medieval period claims it was a time of religious prejudice and ignorance. However, what texts survived from the ancient world in the West largely survived because of the efforts of the scholars of the Carolingian Renaissance. They even invented a new handwriting script to copy texts easier, forming the direct ancestor of most modern-day Latin typefaces!

Sacredness

At the height of the medieval period, vast amounts of labor were put into building cathedrals to glorify God.

The very best libraries have an air of the sacred about them — they are so sublime that it feels sacrilegious to sneeze. Although they require orders of magnitude less labor to build and maintain, aren’t libraries in some sense the cathedrals of modernity, built to glorify the accumulated sum of human knowledge?

Double Fold

Perhaps a modern example? Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold argues that, throughout the 1980s and 90s, libraries obsessed with microfilm and microfiche systematically and unnecessarily destroyed paper records — the Library of Alexandria torching itself.

I haven’t actually read Double Fold. Instead, I read an extensive, anonymous review submitted to a book review contest hosted by the Silicon-Valley-famous newsletter Astral Codex Ten.

Anti-Library

An anti-library is a concept invented by the writer Umberto Eco, popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, and then (re)popularized by Maria Popova’s blog The Marginalian. It refers to all the unread books one accumulates in one’s lifetime — books that you know exist, that you could dip into for research if necessary, that may even have had some impact your life based on what you know of it, but that you have not actually had the chance to read yet.

The Mezzanine

Nicholson Baker is better known for his novel The Mezzanine, of which all 130 pages take place in a single escalator ride. Find a copy in your local library!

Extended Mind

The extended mind is a philosophical thesis that cognition does not occur merely in our brains, but is extended into our environment and tools.

In this thesis, the library is a backup brain — millennia of thought distilled into paper and neatly categorized for later retrieval.

Index

Libraries would be unusable without the deceptively simple invention of the index.

Deceptively simple? To wit, notice that many English-language libraries use two separate indexing schemes: alphabetical-by-author-name for fiction and the Dewey decimal system for non-fiction. Organization by topic is more useful for non-fiction and organization by author is more useful for fiction!

Or, of course, you could simply use a search engine, which most libraries offer through their website. But search engines, and the decades of computer science that have gone into them, are at heart humble indexes.