The Information Dumping Site and Zero Waste

Modern libraries, before the proliferation of mass digital media represent the guardian of information, both old and new, both fictional and scientific. It represent a prison guarded by the academic librarians, public interest in its role are limited to the periodical seek of hungry intellectual and cultural face lift, mostly after a period of fierce barbaric survival quest in the real life. The high door are seldom knocked by the average. For some, the act of reading, is seen as sacred as getting divine enlightenment, in the form of textual codes printed on billions pages of paper. The modern library since then are the warehouse storing those tonnes of paper, inscribing precious information about themselves and the surrounding they are living in.
The analogy. The box of library and the box of the Faraday's Chair by Dunne & Raby. Library as one way data transferring hut.

The traditional library, with its voluminous space, are seen merely as a structural shed, protecting those trillions of data. The space for human activities are voids cut out from this block of data, where data seekers wander around the surfaces of the void. The linear and univalent classification of data often misguide and disappoint passionate data seekers when the mass of data itself could easily overwhelm one's sense of orientation.

The tedious search and the linear presentation of data make the traditional library not more than acting as a decorated shed, often with facade clad with ornamental classical stone, high columns, capitals, wide pediment, and red dressed Queen's guards posted on the two flanks of the monumental doorway. In the east, often in the form of a pretentious buffalo roof, with false concrete rabbets and a bunch of moody pensioner-wannabe civil servant, waiting to annoy anytime you try to cause him leaving his chair. It is certainly not a place for social chemistry nor a shared public realm.

The huge amount of data, generated and overlapped over the human history are uncanny. Both wanted and unwanted, both valuable and discardable for the current human progress and civilization, are store in this warehouse. Thus, the library is the dumping site of expired data. A multi-layered bedrock of intellectual junk, slowly dying in its role in our 21th century world of zero-waste cabled information megastore.