A Universal Brain

In November 2003, while giving a speech at the new Bibliotecha Alexandrina, Umberto Eco considered the role of libraries. ‘Libraries, over the centuries,’ he said, ‘have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not know.’

The idea of the library both as a storehouse and as a living organism, a ‘brain’, holds particular relevance for the National Library of Australia. Here, we store Australia’s collective wisdom – the documentary heritage of Australia and its people – recording the things we have forgotten, the things perhaps most of us never knew, the slivers of information that help us to understand who we are, who we once were and who we would like to become. But, as our current exhibition Future Memory: National Library Recent Acquisitions demonstrates, the National Library’s Collection continues to grow and change.