“The Librarian – a literary motif”

This thesis deals with the topic of information management by studying the librarian in three texts: “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, Anders and Dafne by Göran Hägg, and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson). In Hägg’s novel the librarian is a form of AI, who guides the information seeker by linking together quotations from relevant literature. In Stephenson’s novel the librarian is a program that gathers and evaluates information from the Internet. Finally in “The Library of Babel” the librarian is a disillusioned figure, lost in an ocean of information. The conclusion of the essay is that we need a librarian in the information society, and the librarian’s future form will find examples and warnings in the selected texts. The librarian’s role is to identify, acquire, preserve and evaluate information. Borges’ librarian fails in this, fulfilling only part of the librarian’s role – the gathering and preservation, but he is unable to distinguish relevant texts from nonsense. Hägg’s librarian is at the same time a digital library, similar to Wikipedia, and works by linking texts together to create knowledge. She manages to collect, preserve and make information available through her system of hyperlinks. Stephenson’s librarian is the perfect librarian. Besides preserving information, he gathers relevant information quickly and efficiently, organizes it and makes it available. He is created in the form of a human, and one of the conclusions of this thesis is that this mimicking of interpersonal communication improves the transfer of information.