| This paper will focus on the scholarly
technics and devices which allowed readers and writers to get an intellectual
mastery of the innumerable papyrus book-rolls in the ancient library of
Alexandria (third century BC). Various writing technics and textual formats
were devised in order to provide scholars with a control over and an access
to the units of knowledge these books encompassed. Privileging the text
as an intellectual construction over the material books, extracting words
and data, storing, indexing and combining them, transforming textual materials
through various steps of form and content treatment: such operations rely
on specific graphic interfaces (lists, collections, catalogues, glossaries),
but also on mental technics of memory organization. Material libraries should
be linked with the "portable libraries" and the "libraries
of the mind" which allowed scholars to quote, to edit, to criticize,
to synthesize, to comment upon. One of the lessons of the ancient Alexandrian
library is that scholars had to be librarians, they had to import some fundamental
management technics of the material library into their own research and
writing practices. As a conclusion, I will suggest that being his or her
own librarian is still a major requirement for today scholars, using on-line
libraries and confronted with the challenge of using and structuring the
textual flood of the digital age. |