"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush
Following World War II, the world stood briefly stupefied. The vast scale of the war had, in a sense, made the world seem smaller. The horrors of combat were over, and the soldiers were set to return home. A technological boom had changed everyone's notions of what was possible, and at the front of this newfound sense of discovery was the computer. A wartime innovation, the computer was an invaluable information tool, and the applications of this device were full of possibilities. One man, Vannevar Bush, thought that a computer-like device called the memex was the future of reading.
The memex is intended to compile all one's books, articles, and records into one convenient machine, a sort of "personal library". Vannevar thought that the sheer volume of writing being produced at the time defied the efforts of archivists and collectors. He was at a point in history where, for the first time, people were becoming more aware of how much bigger the world was then they could possibly fathom. The memex was an effort to condense the world into one desk-sized compilation of any text a person could reasonably want, need, or use.
Perhaps the most important legacy of the memex is the burgeoning idea of hypertext. The machine allowed its users to make connections and pathways through different series of texts or portions of texts. "Associative indexing", as Vannevar calls it, allows users to create meaning through comparison, and for others to be able to follow one's stream of consciousness over several works. The memex is the basis for many hypertextual platforms, including Scalar. While Vannevar's desk-library might not be a reality, his prediction was extremely prescient.
For more information about archiving, you may wish to consider the book as a repository of information.
