What is the full title and who the author of the science fiction short
story from the 1950's or early '60s that used the word "liebury"
(perhaps in the title), an alien misreconstruction of "library"
thought to refer to the ocean spanning building that housed our solar
systems knowledge collection before it was moved to the asteroid belt.
 The story is presented as a field report from an investigative
archeological team.  The civilization collapsed when all real
knowledge, Rx, was misreferenced amidst the still exponentially
growing indices, Ix, bibliographies, Bx, and IxBx, BxIx. that refer to
it, resulting in circular references to references.  Introduced
concepts of nudged and notched photon as storage mechanisms.

I am confident that the story you're seeking is "Ms Fnd in a Lbry,"
written by Hal Draper.

"Hal Draper took a break from his life's work of promoting Marxism,
and wrote one science fiction story. The information explosion, and
associated storage and retrieval problems, is humorously examined in
this short story. (This story is also of historical interest,
containing one of the earliest predictions of the Web.)

Knowledge is expanding exponentially, as humanity fills the galaxy and
then some. But advances in physics (which Draper describes in
fictional mathematical terms) are able to keep up with the storage
problem, until all of human knowledge, for all time to come, is packed
into one drawer. Of course, there is one wee problem. Retrieval is
ultimately macroscopic. And so the indexes grow. And when they get
miniaturized, the indexes to the indexes grow. And so on, which then
leads to a higher-order index of the iterated indexes, and then so on
again. All this is spelled out in some detail.

The neverending recursion, while threatening to grow to Ackermann-like
proportions, is still manageable. But when a spontaneously generated
Gödelian self-reference is discovered in the indexing system, the
whole lbry, and with it all of human civilization, collapses
overnight. Absolutely hilarious."

Mathematical Fiction
http://math.cofc.edu/faculty/kasman/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf242

"The plot is about an anthropologist from an alien civilization that
investigates the remains of our civilization several billion years
into the future. It turns out that mankind's fall was brought about by
information overload, inability to catalogue and retrieve knowledge
properly.

The title of the short story comes from the fact that all redundancy
has been removed from our language in order for the information volume
to shrink. Finally the sum of all human knowledge (which was sort of
finite) was stored away in a drawer-sized box by means of subatomic
processes. However the access to that information required complicated
indexes, bibliographies etc, which soon outgrew the size of all
knowledge.

The use of indexes grows exponentially, comprising a pseudo-city,
pseudo-planet and eventually a pseudo-galaxy of information storage.
At this point, a case of circular reference is encountered, and the
civilization needs to refer to the first drawer-sized box to find the
error. However, this drawer has been lost in the pseudo-galaxy, and
soon all of our civilization falls apart while trying to locate the
first drawer.

It turns out that the anthropologist's civilization is actually
heading down the same path."

Dictionary of Literature
http://www.explore-reading.com/literature/M/Ms_Fnd_in_a_Lbry.html

The story was originally published in the December 1961 issue of "The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", and it was reprinted in an
anthology called "17 X Infinity." Fortunately, this paperback
anthology is plentiful on the used book market; copies are easy to
find, and prices are reasonable.

Here you'll find a nice selection to choose among:

Addall SuperRare Book Search
http://used.addall.com/SuperRare/submitRare.cgi?author=&title=17+x+infinity&keyword=&isbn=&order=TITLE&ordering=ASC&dispCurr=USD&binding=Any+Binding&min=&max=&timeout=20&match=Y&StoreAbebooks=on&StoreAlibris=on&StoreAntiqbook=on&StoreBiblio=on&StoreBibliology=on&StoreBiblion=on&StoreZVAB=on

The story has also appeared in at least two other collections:

"DRAPER, HAL (1915?-1990) 
 MS Fnd in a Lbry, (ss) F&SF Dec '61 
 17 X Infinity, ed. Groff Conklin, Dell, 1963 
 Inside Information, ed. Abbe Mowshowitz, Addison-Wesley, 1977 
 Laughing Space, ed. Isaac Asimov & J. O. Jeppson, Houghton Mifflin, 1982"

Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections
http://contento.best.vwh.net/s79.html 

Google search strategy:

Google Web Search: "ms fnd in a lbry" "hal draper"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22ms+fnd+in+a+lbry%22+%22hal+draper%22

I hope this is the correct story. If it is not, or if anything is
unclear or incomplete, please request clarificatinon; I'll be glad to
offer further assistance before you rate my answer.

I'd like to offer my thanks to the unpaid commenters bavi_h-ga and
nemtudom-ga, whose suggestions were of great use to me as I went on
the quest for this story.

Best regards,
pinkfreud

---

Request for Answer Clarification by jotter-ga on 18 Mar 2005 23:29 PST

pinkfreud,

I hope your search was as gratifying to you as to me.  I can't tell
you how much it means to me to have the answer. I feel sure I read the
story in the 17 x Infinity collection once at age 12 and not since.

To have this particular query answered by google search seems ... well
appropriate is perhaps not strong enough a word.  Certainly a bit
strange and unsettling, as though I were somehow still part of that
story.  I had, of course, tried to find the answers on my own, but
without the author or the title (which I now understand why I had
difficulty recalling) I didn't get far.  I also inquired at local
bookstores, to online science fiction boards, and to random strangers,
all to no avail.  If it were not for one friend of my age who also
recalled the story (with no greater detail than I), I might have begun
to believe I was making it up.

My thanks again to you and to the other researchers who put you on the
right track.  I do hope more people at google will become familiar
with the story.

So to reiterate, I have no doubt whatsover that this is the story I
was looking for.  To say the story was memorable is an understatement,
as it has been in the back of mind for 40 years.

I can't recall spending $10 more satisfactorily.

---

Clarification of Answer by pinkfreud-ga on 19 Mar 2005 10:41 PST

Thank you very much for the five stars and the generous tip! It was an
interesting quest, and a rather ironic one, considering the
contributions of the Web and Google to the Information Age.

Ans Fnd wth a Srch Engn.

~pinkfreud

This was a completely satisfactory answer to a long standing question
of mine.  It was particularly pleasing to find references to
discussions and reviews of the story, and to be directed toward
various anthologies it had appeared in.  First rate!

I found an archive of an indexing maling list in which one person is
looking for a science fiction story like you describe:

  I do remember reading another story involving indexing and science
  fiction. I believe it was in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and it
  involved building an index to all the world's knowledge. The index
  was unfortunately lost, and as a result all of the knowledge was
  inaccessible.

  Indexer's Discussion Group - Feburary 22-28, 1995
  http://indexpup.com/index-list/1995/22_February_1995.txt

Someone else in the mailing list suggests in might have been a story
from one of Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series of novels. But none
of Card's fiction was published in the 1950s or 1960s, so that
probably isn't it.

You might want to look at this listing of Fantasy and Science Fiction
contents to see if any of the titles ring a bell:

  Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Listings
  http://isfdb.tamu.edu/fnsf.html

I went back and looked the next archive of the original mailing list.
Someone sent a later reply:

  The story is: "MS FND IN A LBRY" by Hal Draper, Magazine of Fantasy
  and Science Fiction  Dec. 1961.  Reprinted in Library Journal at
  least once.

  Indexer's Discussion Group - March 1-14, 1995
  http://indexpup.com/index-list/1995/01_March_1995.txt

I'm pretty sure this is what you're looking for. Here's a description
I found via Google:

  Ms Fnd In A Lbry - Dictionary of Literature
  http://www.explore-reading.com/literature/M/Ms_Fnd_in_a_Lbry.html

It's definitely that Hal Draper story, which is on pp. 76-81 of the
December 1961 F&SF. Quoting from p. 77:

This building, 25 miles square and 2 miles high, was buried in one of
the oceans to save land surface for parking space, and so our
etymological team is fairly sure that the archaic term liebury (lbry)
dates from this period.