We live at a threshold moment in the history of libraries and the forms of knowledge they imply - a moment comparable to that of early antiquity when the clay tablets of the pre-Christian era were replaced by papyrus rolls; or when these rolls gave way, in the fourth century AD, to parchment leaves bound in codex; comparable, finally, to the transformation of the great monastic libraries of the Middle Ages, where manuscripts were chained to desks, into the Renaissance humanist libraries in which the numerous books made available by printing came to be stacked along the walls, configuring the library as we know it. One cannot but see significant links between new technologies of information, the most diverse cultural forms, and the deepest social structures caused by such large transformations in the techniques of both writing and of storing and making writing available. The library, as a place for the definition and preservation of cultural and scientific memory, has always had as much to do with the construction of the present and the future as with the past.The printed book seems destined to move to the margin of our literature culture... This shift from print to the computer does not mean the end of literacy. What will be lost is not literacy itself, but the literacy of print, for electronic technology offers us a new kind of book and new ways to write and read.
As a new writing technology, the computer is yet another instance of the metaphor of writing in the mind. With the aid of the computer, the writer constructs the text as a dynamic network of verbal and visual symbols. These electronic symbols in the machine seem to be an extension of a network of ideas in the mind itself. More effectively than the codex or the printed book, the computer reflects the mind as a web of verbal and visual elements in a conceptual space. When technology provided us with printed books and photographs, our minds were repositories of fixed texts and still images. When the contemporary technology is electronic, our minds become pulsing networks of ideas.