The library of the Museion in Alexandria is generally regarded as the first universal library. However, a Look at the few authenticated facts will show how questionable such a characterization is. The universality of the library of the Museion seems to have its roots in the stories that are told about it, most famously about its destruction. The fact that this story, as weil as others, hardly stands up to close examination is to be seen rather as a peculiar characteristic than as a defect. Ever since philology emerged at the Alexandrian Library, we communicate by our history and our stories, by doing philology (or by having to do philology). Therefore the universality of the library of the Museion might be based on the f act that it has to be viewed as a library phenomenon which was preserved in the collections of many libraries. This paper was delivered at the library history seminar held in London in r996 on the theme of the 'Universal Library'.A scrutiny of some histories of the Alexandrian library suggests that it is the perfect model of a universal library because it collected every book on every subject in every language. The Alexandrian library therefore contained not only the enkyklios paideia, i.e. the circle of learning, but was a monument to a more far-reaching concept: all aspects of humari knowledge, from scientific to everyday, were tobe found on the shelves of the Alexandrian library. Today such an idea seems outdated. In the course of the nineteenth century, the circle of learning expanded into many worlds of learning, and ever since we have h ad an incoherent profusion of sciences, each of them publishing copiously. lt is therefore absolutely impossible to collect the complete published scientific record, much less the whole range of what the Greeks referred to as techne, with all those books on horseback riding, driving a car, and baking. This explains why Daniel Gore declared twenty years ago that the solution to our library problems would consist in a 'Farewell to Alexandria', and in a new library as a non-growth collection of books. 1 In our time, another Mr Gore is trying to convince us that we should be aiming for an information superhighway offering everyone free access to all documents -on condition that the documents are converted from paper to electronic format and on condition that this fabulous information superhighway is more than the daily traffic jam that it actually is.In any event, calling to mind the Alexandrian library would appear to be a piece of old-fashioned history -entertaining if it is good, boring if it is bad, but without any relevance to what transpires in our modern or postmodern libraries. But what if the history of the Alexandrian library revealed that there is no alternative to the Alexandrian concept of a library? In this case, all our modern or postmodern attempts to get rid of

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Der bibliothekarische Mainstream geht davon aus, dass die wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken „Serviceeinrichtungen“ seien, deren Personal nicht Wissenschaft zu betreiben, sondern „Service“ zu erbringen habe. Damit wird nicht nur das Berufsbild der Bibliothekare um seine Geschichte gekürzt, sondern zugleich das Entwicklungspotential der Bibliotheken beschränkt. Wer in dieser Situation nach unbeschränkt-offenen Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten der Bibliotheken sucht, wird diese kaum in den umlaufenden Strategiepapieren finden, sondern einzig in einer Reflexion des eigenen Tuns, einer Reflexion, deren Schriftform eine Einladung zum Dialog ist.

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