SciFi Motherlode Donated to Canadian University

Freshly Exhumed writes: "SciFan aficionados might soon be lining up to study at the University of Calgary due to an amazing donation: A massive collection of science fiction and pulp magazines spanning the last century has been donated to the University of Calgary which officials say will be a boon for literary and pop culture research. William Gibson had spent many of his 92 years sealing his prized collection in plastic, leaving behind a true motherlode of science fiction writings."

Comments

Re:digitize?

[Nick Barnes]

those books will only last a few precious years of handling before they're lost forever.

This is almost certainly not the case. The idea that books turn to dust on the shelves is largely false. Even books printed on quite acidic paper will probably last for centuries (with typical research library handling frequency) if they are well looked after. If they are cut up and fed into scanners, they will then be thrown away. Experience suggests that the scans will be of mediocre quality (missing some pages, missing parts of other pages, frequently having insufficient contrast to be legible, and losing any colour or greyscale information present in the originals). Also lost would be all the historical value inherent in the books as physical objects and in the collection as a whole.

The "slow fires" were invented by technocrat library managers as propaganda to generate funds for "preservation" projects. These huge projects have given the managers much power and prestige while destroying millions of volumes of irreplaceable books and newspapers. Read Double Fold (Nicholson Baker, Amazon) for much more on this subject.