A Library with a Future

Ever since the legendary burning of the ancient library of Alexandria, the notion of storing all available or all relevant knowledge in a single repository, has exercised a powerful hold on Western imagination. Libraries touch a raw nerve, all the more so since good news concerning them seems rare. In an age that places a premium on knowledge and information, books occupy a diminishing space. Libraries are haemorrhaging books by the skip-load. They face formidable challenges: lack of space; lack of funding. At the same time there is more information available in print and other formats than ever before. As Matthew Battle, Harvard’s librarian, concludes in his recent Library: An Unquiet History: ‘The library in the digital age is in a state of flux, which is indistinguishable from a state of crisis.’ Yet, it is possible to deal with such problems in an innovative way, as the transfer of the FCO Historical Library to King’s College London shows.