This page is courtesy of Arjay Books, a subsidiary of Arjay Enterprises. It collects links to the Metalibrary concept. If you have a resource you would like to see listed here, contact us.

History:

The term "metalibrary" was coined in the early 1980's by Rick Sutcliffe (who also first used such terms as concinnity, The Fourth Civilization, and The New Renaissance in various columns, papers, and books).

Definition:

An (abstract) metalibrary is the entire collection of a society's data, information, and techniques, together with the means by which it is stored, accessed, and communicated.

The Metalibrary of the fourth civilization is the complete, electronically linked and accessed version of its abstract metalibrary.

A fuller explanation is given in Section 4.4 of The Fourth Civilization--Technology, Society, and Ethics

The Metalibrary, with portable and to some extent implanted access, is a key feature of the technology in Greater Hibernia, a World of the Timestream, part of Rick Sutcliffe's Alternate History SF.