The idea of a universal digital library is so surreal to even think about. It is hard to try and picture the entire world's documents and books into one big accessible resource. If the goal is to have one large place with the entire world's works of text for all of humanity, that would be having every work ever created by what Dictionary.com defines, "the quality or condition of being human" (unknown, 2012). This includes such documents as books, scholarly notes, articles, blogs, and pretty much anything else ever recorded in text anywhere in the world. In this present day and age, not only would creating a universal digital library for all of humanity be a dangerous concept, it would also be next to impossible to accurately create due to the constantly changing culture in our world today.
Kresh (2007) states that, "traditional libraries are limited by storage space, while digital libraries have the potential to store much more information simply because digital information requires very little physical space to contain it. As such, the cost of maintaining a digital library is much lower than that of a traditional library. A traditional library must spend large sums of money paying for stuff, book maintenance, rent, and additional books" (Kresh, 2007, page 2). However, we must not think that a digital library would be free. There would have to be a power source behind the operation, and personally by the way the Internet is now, I would think it would most likely be produced and funded up by Google INC or another big company with a lot of power and financial backup. Nevertheless, I am sure the corporation would not invest tones of money, effort, and time to scan all these books and documents just to be nice. The world revolves around money, and I would predict that Google would turn the whole universal digital library into one huge moneymaking bank. It would be a private operation over a public operation, and the public would, in reality, would have limited free access to the truth of everything.
