Royal Society Opens Free Online Archive

greenechidna writes "The Register reports that the Royal Society has put its archives online. From the article: 'One of the world's most important historical records will be made available online for the first time today. All the Royal Society's journals are free for two months and include stone-cold scientific classics going back to 1665 and the foundations of modern inquiry.'" You can set up your own account at the Royal Society; if you follow the link in the Reg article, you get logged in to some random account.

Comments

Re:Ra Ra Ra

[Doc Ruby]

Actually, the Alexandria Library loss is largely myth. Sure, the library was burned. But ancient libraries, much like today's, did not house only unique copies. The ancient tradition of transcription was not solely to preserve "books" (usually scrolls and decks of leaves) serially in time, but also in parallel in space. There were many ancient libraries holding many of the same books.

Moreover, many of the Alexandria books weren't burned. They were "put into general circulation", both into the hands of centuries of attackers like the Arabs from whom European Crusaders (and their campfollower merchats) brought them to the rest of Europe for the first time, and throughout the area many times when security was breached. And of course there are the really ancient works written in stone monuments, artifacts and jewelry.

Ancient Egypt's working civilization lasted for thousands of years, inspiring its culture of actual immortality. Essential to it was a system of info transfer that would survive all kinds of unexpected disasters. If one burning library could wipe it out, we'd never have heard of it.

Re:Ra Ra Ra

[CxDoo]

Library of Alexandria was established by Greek dynasty and has little to do with ancient Egyptian civilization, about which, btw, we indeed knew very little before Napoleon's Egyptian Expedition.