The Imperial Library

The Imperial Library is a vast archive of information collected by emperors for thousands of years. Founded by Empress Wayan in IY 3206, at creation it incorporated the first Galactic Survey and the Emperor's private archives, plus the donated private records of several members of the Imperial court and the official records of most government agencies.

The library has grown continually since then, through the expansion of its original collections and the acquisition of further material. The records contained include official documents, survey and census data, and media recordings. The contents are stored in a distributed data grid connected through Imperial spacefold data transfer points, and backed up to at least three separate data nodes (the exact number of backups is kept secret for security).

In its early years, the efficiency of the library was hampered by the difficulty of organizing its content. This led to the development of the Imperial Encyclopedia, officially launched in IY 3408. The Encyclopedia presents the contents of the Library as a database, with commonly-accessed information held in local nodes and the ability to retrieve random records from core information repositories.

The Library remained a private resource of the Emperor until IY 5670, when John 14th opened parts of it to the public in the spirit of community-building that arose after resolving the Second Schism. The materials released include complete survey charts of the galaxy, historical and social documents and major philosophical and political works. Primarily these were made available through the Encyclopedia, which has gained such popularity that most of its users are now probably unaware that Library data is available by other means.

The library charges fees for access to the encyclopedia, and those fees can vary greatly depending on the work required to obtain data. Widely held "public class" documents are so inexpensive as to be practically free, and often retrieved by children as part of their education. At the other extreme, specialized survey reports might cost more than the yearly budgets of some small planetary governments.

When reading the encyclopedia, one must remember that material has been collected from a variety of sources which vary in quality. All encyclopedic content has been rated for reliability and accuracy, and quotes from the encyclopedia should be assumed to decline in both as they travel farther from the source. Articles are also updated and revised over time.

All the excerpts presented here are top-rated for both accuracy and reliability (as is common for public-class information) and are presented here at an info-distance of one translation from the sources in the encyclopedia itself.

Library Classification

Library articles are tagged with a specification such as this:

The bracketed parts provide different pieces of information about the article:

• [501/1/104] - the base library ID of the article. The three numbers are the category, subcategory and index number. In this case, 501 signifies history and subcategory 1 means overviews.
• [SenEn] - the language of the article, in this case ancient English.
• [PUBLIC] - the article's security status: public, restricted or secret.
• [1] - the last bracket gives the "info-distance" of the article. This is a short guide to reliability, indicating the number of times it has been translated or revised compared to the source.