Wealthy individuals during and around the gilded age had a view of charity that was in some senses very similar to modern charity by the super-wealthy, but also quite different. Like today's wealthy, they often used charity as a mechanism for social climbing, and as a dick-measuring contest. They also used it to try and fend off criticism that is usually directed at them when income inequality gets very high.

However, they were also often guided by a strict idea of noblesse obliger, which we would consider patronizing and archaic today, but which was considered an extremely serious task for them. It was fundamentally their role in society, as they saw it. They were also quite a bit more religiously motivated. This extended to the idea of public service and holding public office (of course they also held those positions as a way to help themselves to the pot, but the two ideas were often present at the same time). They saw charity as an act of duty before as an act of kindness in many instances.

The modern super wealthy no longer think of themselves as constrained by a notion of "duty", for better and for worse.

The 1% of the past were much more involved in government and ofcourse the military. I always found it interesting that in ancient Rome even the most decadent senators spent a few years as an officer in the legions.

Google actually went and scanned every book they could get their hands on - including the libraries of multiple universities - as part of the Google Books project. It could have been a digital library of Alexandria (I also seem to recall that universities had hoped to make their collections available to their students and faculty at the very least.) I believe the Library of Congress was also scanned, so we could in theory make any book in the collection available to anyone in the world over the internet in seconds at almost zero cost.

Copyright law seems to have locked most of the works in these amazing digital libraries up so that they are currently available publicly only via a search function that returns small excerpts (and even that would have been shut down had Google not prevailed in court against the Authors' Guild's claims of copyright infringement.)

At the very least, it would be nice to be able to read all of the scanned books in the Library of Congress that are out of copyright, out of print, and/or not being sold or rented by the author or publisher.