Search

This essay suggests that the Library of Alexandria emerged from poetry. The poetry of the Alexandrian avant-garde influenced the reference tool of the library, known as the Pinakes . I argue by looking at the structure of the Pinakes as a new tool—a new muse—providing artistic inspiration. Furthermore, I contend that the entries in the Pinakes also possessed poetic qualities. I conclude that the Hellenistic library in Alexandria was in fact a poetry machine, both as being poetry itself and as the means to produce poetry.

This panel features junior and senior scholars from the United States, Denmark, and Brazil, who will come together to discuss some of the central tensions between local and global knowledge organization systems. They will be in conversation around three key questions: 1) What are the contexts in which local and global knowledge organization systems matter? 2) What can we learn about the stakes of global/local knowledge organization from those contexts? 3) How can we conceptualize the relationship between the universal and the particular? The panelists will provide brief overviews of their perspectives, and the majority of the time will be reserved for an interactive discussion of the epistemological, practical, and ethical dimensions of global and local knowledge organization. The contexts addressed will include libraries, archives, and digital, social, and popular media. Within those settings, the panelists are concerned with such issues as access, hegemony, intended and unintended consequences, and meaning construction in particular domains, spaces, and communities.

Purpose– Mnemonics was a tool in classification and information seeking processes in pre-print libraries. The purpose of this paper is to study the role of spatial mnemonics in Hellenistic libraries, including the one in Alexandria.Design/methodology/approach– Since library- and information science has not explored this subject in depth, philology, rhetoric, book-history and archeology constitute the core literature. From this literature, the role of mnemonics in the libraries is discussed.Findings– A new description of the practice of classification and retrieval in Hellenistic libraries, based on spatial mnemonics.Originality/value– This paper is a new analysis of spatial mnemonics in the Hellenistic libraries. As will become clear, they blend easily and logically with each other.

For millennia the famous library in Hellenistic Alexandria has been praised as an epicenter of enlightenment and wisdom. And yet, a question still seems unanswered: how was its literature classified and retrieved? It is a subject that has been given surprisingly little attention by the field of library-and-information science―indeed, by scholarship in general. Furthermore, a certain way of thinking has influenced the few answers that have so far been attempted. It is as if the scholars of our era have tried to identify the modern, physical library in the Hellenistic library in Alexandria. But such an approach is biased in a basic way: It simply does not consider the impact of the cultural and intellectual context of the library. This article differs fundamentally, because I reject the notion that the library was like those of today. Accordingly, an entirely new way of understanding how the library actually worked, in terms of classification and retrieval processes is presented. The key element is to understand the library both as a physical structure and as a struc- ture in the memory of the Alexandrian scholars. In this article, these structures are put together so as to propose a new interpretation of the library.

This paper is based on the progress made over the past 10 years by some of Europe’s largest microelectronics training organisations. The paper commences with a short presentation on the background to and the need for an ongoing microelectronics training programme. It moves on to highlight new ideas and proposals for developing the technology transfer in the most effective way. The history of this paper is based on the NORCHIP, EUROCHIP, EUROPRACTICE and EuroTraining programmes — the key players being CMP and IMEC. Together these initiatives have formed the world’s most comprehensive microelectronics training action, described in the references [1] to [4].