Encyclopaedia... textbook.... journal... index... bibliography... library... university...
Well-defined elements of academic life since at least the mid-eighteenth century. Flowing from a common source in the Graeco-Roman era, they will surely return their original unity. Technological advance caused their separation, and now technological advance guarantees their reunion.
One might call the institution which will result from their fusion a panepistemion, the more expressive Greek term for a university, but the word comes awkwardly to an English speaker's tongue. We will call it a virtual library.
It is indeed a library because it will house, eventually, all the books in all the libraries of the world. But it will surpass existing libraries because anyone anywhere (with a computer) will be able to access it. This universal accessibility means it is not a "coffin for books" -- bibliothêkê, as the Greeks had it -- but a fountain of learning.
It is its own card catalogue. Look up any subject, any author; you will find no call number, but the document itself. Catalogues were invented in Alexandria when the Greeks realized that a single work could be filed under many headings, or so the story goes. But in the electronic age, cataloguing schemes need not describe a single long row of physical volumes snaking through the stacks. A text can be resident on a computer but can still be accessed on another computer. Classification schemes are not one-dimensional; they are no longer confined to a card. Hierarchical indices and tables can display data cataloguing texts in ways that a single card cannot. A librarian need not assign a single number that approximates the book's subject. A librarian can create a link under any and every subject a book covers.
In the first half of the XX Century, S.R. Ranganathan and the British Classification Group developed facted indexing, a vector rather than scalar notation for classifying books. They lacked the technology to implement their system and were constrained by the necessity of placing a book in a specific row. The Internet provides the technology and removes the limitations of stacks.
A virtual library is its own index. Not only books but chapters, paragraphs, words, can in principle be catalogued. The first indexers in the Renaissance are supposed to have dreamed of such an index before realizing its difficulty. Now, in principle at least, the vision could be realized.
It is an encyclopaedia, in the most literal sense, encircling education. The encyclopaedia, at least in the Western world, originated as a book of excerpts, the best words of the best writers, since their complete works were far too bulky for any scholar to own in toto. Today, and indeed yesterday, ever since the advent of the CD/ROM, the storage of the written record has ceased (or should have ceased) to be an issue, but the question of organizing that record remains. The virtual library by its structure must offer a tentative solution, while remaining flexible enough for readers to discover their own.
It is the ultimate journal. Scholarly journals were invented as a tool of communication, replacing the hand-to-hand circulation of reports. The journals have served their function well since the seventeenth century, but now their prohibitive cost is forcing libraries to choose between bankrupting themselves and cancelling subscriptions. But the virtual library needs no Malayan rain-forest of paper-pulp and knows no difference between long book and brief report. As is already happening with the physics archives, the virtual library will inevitably absorb the journal system.
It is in fact, a university in its own right. Modern librarians -- modest heirs indeed to the mantle of Eratosthenes and Aristarchus, Goethe, Hume, and Kant! -- view themselves as mere auxiliaries in the academic army, albeit often important ones. But in the virtual library, every scholar is in some ways a librarian, and every librarian in all ways a scholar. Only a scholar can organize knowledge, and the organization of knowledge engenders scholarship. In the same way, the barriers between classroom teaching and library research will also fall.
Of course, all of this, while almost a certainty on the scale of centuries, may or may not occur in the immediate future. There is however no a priori reason why a modest version of the virtual library could not exist right now, in conjunction with the emerging online and distance universities.
Our suggestions of how this might be done follow: