ON THE ANALYSIS OF LIBRARY GROWTH
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for us exponential struggle, or the peaceful and perhaps dull
coexistence with a steady state of information production and decay.
2. Four Fundamental Communication Inventions
The purpose of the library is to store and provide access to the
information accumulated by man throughout history. Thus it is
reasonable to expect a relationship between library growth and
growth or change in other components of civilization. This funda-
mental relationship does not seem to have been sufficiently em-
phasized in the literature, but it is important for a balanced under-
standing of the current growth situation. Therefore, it seems ap-
propriate to make a brief historical digression.
Four fundamental inventions can be recognized in the history
of civilization. Each of them produced changes of unprecedented
magnitude and extent; all of them have a common aspect. The
first was the invention of complex writing systems, capable of
expressing abstract concepts as well as names and actions, in the
Near East not much earlier than 3000 B.c. (cf. Ref. 4). It was
immediately followed by the rise of the oldest of the high civiliza-
tions known today—the Egyptian and Mesopotamian—and was
perhaps the cause of their rise. These elaborate and inefficient
writing systems made possible the accumulation of archival in-
formation stores containing records of complex processes and ob-
servations relating to mathematics, astronomy, law, political ad-
ministration, and commercial accounts. There is no indication of the
existence of complex political organizations or scientific effort in
societies not having a writing system.
Nearly 2000 years later the alphabetic system of writing was
introduced by the Greeks (Ref. 4) ,ɪ and their remarkable civiliza-
tion rose to its great heights shortly after. The significance of an
alphabetic writing system cannot be overestimated : it is markedly
more efficient for communication, requires less time to learn,
and is therefore accessible to greater numbers of people. It pro-
vides a startling comparative advantage in communication for the
maintenance of commercial and administrative records, for the
recording of mathematical and scientific information, and even for
those communications necessary for the extended prosecution of
military efforts ranging over great distances. The mental effort
and time required to read a given amount of information recorded
in one of the ancient Egyptian writing forms or in cuneiform
Akkadian is enormous compared with an alphabetic language
representation.