As some see it, the current “information age” threatens to make knowledge as ephemeral as an electronic purse flitting through a fiber-optic cable.

Everything new they learned was in danger of being lost and forgotten, whether through the hostility of those who feared new ideas or, more insidiously through the simple neglect of those unwilling to organize and preserve a collective civilizational memory. Today, as we again face the daunting task of organizing all our knowledge, we would do well to study the example of those who showed an equal boldness to do so under far more adverse conditions.

This story includes a rich array of events and characters, from the medieval Christian monks who devised schemes to preserve knowledge as the Roman Empire crumbled around them to the scholars who set up an international “Republic of Letters” to unify early modern Europe as it was being torn apart by Protestants and Catholics at war.

Western scholars simply found particular, enduring solutions. These include how to produce knowledge, by converting oral philosophical traditions into written scholarship; how to pre- serve it, by copying manuscripts, establishing a canon of scriptures, and ensuring that the meaning and sense of their language is maintained; and how to transmit it, by animating the dead letter in face-to-face discussion and debate or surmounting the impossibilities of face-to-face contact by resorting to letters. (Mapa)

In times of stability these institutions carried the torch of learning. In times of upheaval, individuals and small communities reinvented knowledge in founding new institutions. (¿Qué hacían para preservar la información?)

If we can understand where it came from, perhaps we can make educated guesses about where it is going.

Nor is it a history of education, though it argues that the way knowledge is conveyed from generation to generation is inseparable from the content of that knowledge.

Most obviously, it hardly touches on informal knowledge, the type of knowledge we get from reading a newspaper, fixing a motorcycle, parenting a child, or creating a work of art. Formal knowledge, the kind organized by institutions for the wider public world, is our province. (Otro reto: conocimiento informal)

Do they debate their colleagues in verbal confrontations or write books in solitude for faraway readers? Do they scrutinize nature as they find it or trick it into doing the unexpected? Do they engage with their contemporaries or labor on behalf of scholars past and future? Do they close ranks to preserve embattled truths or spread learning for the benefit of all? These are but a few of the issues affecting how the life of the mind has been constructed and reconstructed over centuries.

Also important are decisions about privacy and publicity, whom to exclude and whom to include. We highlight these by examining women’s varying access to the world of knowledge and the gender-saturated ideologies governing both men's and women’s contributions to it. (¿Afecta, o no?)

It is not enough to pile up all the great books in a room and assume that they will inspire the thirst for knowledge. As the founders of the first library, at Alexandria, well knew, one had somehow to categorize learning, or there would be no way to grasp its meaning and relationship to other bodies of knowledge.

We have recently witnessed the emergence of a new technology, the Internet, with great potential to reshape the way we produce, preserve, and transmit knowledge around the globe. But innovation in technology does little in itself to guarantee the progress of knowledge as a whole.

Many alternative ways of knowing, of learning, and of teaching have been lost or submerged beneath the layers of history that underlie the present organization of knowledge. If the life of the mind is indeed undergoing a structural transformation, it is all the more important to recall what history has seemingly discarded, to turn a potentially destabilizing situation into one that will revitalize the pursuit of knowledge in the future.

The history of knowledge is a discontinuous one, full of paths not taken, and the current system may not be the best of all possible worlds.

We risk committing a serious error by thinking that cheap information made universally available through electronic media fulfills the requirements of a democratic society for organized knowledge. Past generations had to win knowledge by using their wits, and never took what they knew for granted.