Mozart the Librarian

“Everything has been composed; just not yet written down.” – Mozart, in a letter to his father

Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, calls himself a “digital librarian”. In a talk he gave (video available online, a good watch), he spoke of his goal being to collect all the digital content available and archive it for future access. In perhaps the same vein, Mozart seems to have viewed himself as merely a transcriber of the music he was receiving.

That’s my goal with this weblog–to collect content and make it available for future use–like Vannevar Bush’s Memex, or Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits. The question is how my puny brain could possible amalgamate enough content to be worthwhile.

Maybe eventually I will be able to merge my knowledge base with that of others in some way (I think I will call it “The Internet”), or be able to form a sub-group that precisely supplies my desired data–but in the meantime, I am finding it very exciting and surprisingly fulfilling to be a “librarian”–even if it is the type that “just moves pixels around“.