Room, Library

A library is a thing of beauty; it is one of the most valuable assets of humankind. People who only read newspapers and depend on radio and television announcers for information seldom enrich their minds. A collection of books represents generations of research. For example, Webster’s Dictionary contains millions of words, but the production of that volume necessitated continuous work since the time when the English language was first spoken. Words and their relation to grammar had to be studied, printing machines made, materials dug from the earth, trees felled to make paper, and labor continued until the process was concluded.

A library is an organized collection of sources of information and similar resources, which typically books, scrolls, folios, manuscripts, and/or (depending on the culture) electronic media as well. Items may be shelved, racked, or stored in heaps. Methods of recording information vary among cultures

Libraries can come in many forms. Alien or crazed beings might stored information in nontraditional ways, including paintings whose scenes move and change, crystals that project knowledge when lit, or disembodied brains that answer questions. A library might be the entire history of the dungeon, carved into the walls, floors, and ceiling of a special chamber. That of a demon might imprison mortal souls to serve as an encyclopedia of the condemned. The library of a nature deity might be written on the leaves of an immense oak tree, and only when a particular leaf falls is its knowledge ready to be learned.

Notable Libraries across the Multiverse include:

• • The Citadel Library

  • The Empress's Zendaris Dataenter, located a hundred light-years from the seat of imperial power. Everyone who lives there either works for it, or provides some necessary service for those who do. Its record computers and archives are the most extensive in the Empire and contain, among other things, the true history of the Empress and her Empire. Non-unique items are copied or backed up to dozens of other facilities on other planets throughout the Empire; unique items are kept far underground in the most secure holding vaults the Empire can create.

  • Docro (“Archive”) of the Malvan empire is a city devoted to keeping the records and accounts of Malva. From the Malvans’ earliest handwritten records to their most advanced computerized data, it’s all here in a library/archive the size of a city — the history, literature, social records, and scientific discoveries from nearly a million years of civilization. There are some gaps, of course, since Malva wasn’t always a unified planet, and some items are kept in museums at other locations, but nearly any research project conducted by a Malvan scholar, or scholars of other species studying Malva, begins here. The librarian-robots and archival systems at Docro are enormously helpful — in fact, without them a newcomer to the city will have a hard time finding what he wants amid the veritable mountains of data, books, and media. But they also serve as gatekeepers, since some parts of Docro (such as the sections devoted to Malvan scientific and technical data) aren’t open to just anyone. If necessary they’ll even employ force as a backup to the city’s formidable static security systems, but their weapons, like those of the systems, are designed not to harm the objects or data they guard. The residents of Docro are mostly historians, scholars, and other Malvans with an interest in such things. It’s a tight-knit community, one that’s often contemptuous of visitors until they prove they have the intellectual chops to keep up with the native experts — or at least the curiosity and respect to seek their assistance and defer to them.