What if you could consult Winston Churchill on a looming international crisis? Or ask Einstein what he thinks about the latest scientific breakthrough? National security expert Juliane Gallina is working on a way to harness the best thinking strategies of all time.

Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library -- every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history ... It's all free to the public -- unless someone else gets to it first.

Jay Walker, curator of the Library of Human Imagination, conducts a surprising show-and-tell session highlighting a few of the intriguing artifacts that backdropped the 2008 TED stage.

Architect Joshua Prince-Ramus takes the audience on dazzling, dizzying virtual tours of three recent projects: the Central Library in Seattle, the Museum Plaza in Louisville and the Charles Wyly Theater in Dallas.

Library events are exactly what they sound like: TEDx events that are hosted at a library. They are usually recurring events, and offer a unique space to share the TED and TEDx spirit with your local community. About this event type A library event license follows the same format as the standard event license, except that this event is held at ...

2,300 years ago, the rulers of Alexandria set out to fulfill an audacious goal: to collect all the knowledge in the world under one roof. In its prime, the Library of Alexandria housed an unprecedented number of scrolls and attracted some of the Greek world's greatest minds. But by the end of the 5th century CE, it had vanished. Elizabeth Cox de...

Libraries are a magical place full of life and endless stories — both real and imagined. We're delighted to share these TED Talks as a love letter to libraries, librarians and the community they build.

Michael Bierut is a partner in the New York office of Pentagram, a founder of Design Observer and a teacher at Yale School of Art and Yale School of Management.

TED Books are small books about big ideas. In September 2014, the imprint relaunched, offering titles in hardcover for the first time. Below: highlights from recent and earlier titles (the latter in e-book only). Newest releases Earlier titles A-F G-L M-P Q-S T-Z

When he was just 14 years old, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts, working from rough plans he found in a library book.

When Michael Bierut was tapped to design a logo for public school libraries, he had no idea that he was embarking on a years-long passion project. In this often hilarious talk, he recalls his obsessive quest to bring energy, learning, art and graphics into these magical spaces where school librarians can inspire new generations of readers and th...

Whether you're a budding bibliophile or already in the throes of whirlwind romance with your favorite writers, these talks are for you!

Libraries have the power to create a better world; they connect communities, promote literacy and spark lifelong learners. But there's one thing that keeps people away: the fear of overdue book fines. In this thought-provoking talk, librarian Dawn Wacek makes the case that fines don't actually do what we think they do. What if your library just ...

Deep inside Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lies a 240 page tome. Recently carbon dated to around 1420, its pages feature looping handwriting and hand drawn images seemingly stolen from a dream. It is called the Voynich manuscript, and it's one of history's biggest unsolved mysteries. The reason why? No one can figure out what i...

Jean-Baptiste Michel looks at how we can use large volumes of data to better understand our world.

Erez Lieberman Aiden pursues a broad range of research interests, spanning genomics, linguistics, mathematics ...

It's been said that when an elder dies, it's as if a library is burned. Anthropologist Elizabeth Lindsey, a National Geographic Fellow, collects the deep cultural knowledge passed down as stories and lore.

You work at the college library. You're in the middle of a quiet afternoon when suddenly, a shipment of 1,280 books arrives. The books are in a straight line, but they're all out of order, and the automatic sorting system is broken. How can you sort the books quickly? Chand John shows how, shedding light on how algorithms help librarians and sea...

What would it be like to have a limitless memory? Can the meaning of life be found in an infinite library? Is time a labyrinth or a single moment? Jorge Luis Borges explored these questions of infinity in his many works. His body of essays, poems and stories pioneered the literary style known as magical realism— and each was just a few pages lon...

Jay Walker is fascinated by intellectual property in all its forms. His firm, Walker Digital, created Priceline and many other businesses that reframe old problems with new IT. In his private life, he's a bibliophile and collector on an epic scale.

Charlie Todd causes bizarre, hilarious, and unexpected public scenes: Seventy synchronized dancers in storefront windows, "ghostbusters" running through the New York Public Library, and the annual no-pants subway ride. His group, Improv Everywhere, uses these scenes to bring people together.

Public libraries have always been about more than just books -- and their mission of community support has taken on new urgency during the current opioid epidemic. After witnessing overdoses at her library in Philadelphia, Chera Kowalski learned how to administer naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of narcotics, and she's put it to use to...

All about great design, these talks focus on solving problems while bringing beauty to the world. Learn more about the salon, curated by TED's own Chee Pearlman.

The modern hard drive is an object that can likely hold more information than your local library. But how does it store so much information in such a small space? Kanawat Senanan details the generations of engineers, material scientists, and quantum physicists who influenced the creation of this incredibly powerful and precise tool. [Directed by...

Imagine if you could surf Facebook ... from the Middle Ages. Well, it may not be as far off as it sounds. In a fun and interesting talk, Frederic Kaplan shows off the Venice Time Machine, a project to digitize 80 kilometers of books to create a historical and geographical simulation of Venice across 1,000 years.

Master architects share their vision for buildings that inflate, float, twist and glitter, while artfully addressing the challenges faced by their residents, their cities and the planet.

Gregory Heyworth uses spectral imaging technology to uncover lost classics that could rewrite history.

Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

After a visit to a European library in search of Arabic and Middle Eastern texts turned up only titles about fear, terrorism and destruction, Ghada Wali resolved to represent her culture in a fun, accessible way. The result: a colorful, engaging project that uses LEGO to teach Arabic script, harnessing the power of graphic design to create conne...

Ann Morgan considered herself well read -- until she discovered the "massive blindspot" on her bookshelf. Amid a multitude of English and American authors, there were very few books from beyond the English-speaking world. So she set an ambitious goal: to read one book from every country in the world over the course of a year. Now she's urging ot...