ON THE ANALYSIS OF LIBRARY GROWTH
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perience accumulated by previous generations is maintained and
organized (albeit superficially) ; they are the information reposi-
tories on which all future developments are founded. If it is true
that the growth of civilization, and indeed its growth rate, depends
on the capabilities for storage, transmission, and retrieval of infor-
mation, then it inevitably follows that the role of libraries as
storage banks for information in printed as well as machine-
readable form—and of computers to transmit and retrieve, as well
as to analyze, modify, and re-store that information—must become
more central and important as time passes. Governmental support
for library systems, and library support for and experiments with
computers is, if our argument is essentially correct, imperative for
the continued growth of civilization. Examples of the interaction
between efficient information-processing and the growth of civili-
zation that may help to place the previous remarks in perspective
are discussed below.
World Population Growth
The “population explosion” is a consequence of decreased death
rates since there is relatively little that can be done to increase
the per capita annual birth rate. As Figure 3 shows, the rate of
growth of world population—that is, the decrease in the death
rate—increased markedly after 1500, and has been increasing ever
since in a historically unprecedented manner. This must be attri-
buted primarily to the rapid communication of medical knowledge,
sanitation techniques, advances in agriculture, and so forth, made
possible by the invention of printing a few decades earlier. A
similar population explosion probably occurred in the Greek world
between 1000 B.c. and 500 B.c., and even earlier in historical Egypt
and Mesopotamia, although accurate population estimates are
lacking. The vast construction programs of the Egyptians and
Akkadians, and the similar later ones of the Chinese, provide evi-
dence of a massive long-term employment of labor and consequently
of a relative surplus of population. It is of no importance to this
argument what proportion of these populations might have been
“immigrants” of one type or another.
Mathematical Research
Mathematical research depends in a direct way on the availabili-
ty of an archive and the efficient transmission of information.
Even in ancient times there was relatively rapid communication
of important new results. For instance, Archimedes was well
informed about the astronomical theories of Aristarchus although