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Oxford Expands Library With 153 Miles of Shelves
Oxford University's Bodleian Library has purchased a huge £26m warehouse to give a proper home to over 6 million books and 1.2 million maps. The Library has been housing the collection in a salt mine, and plans on transferring the manuscripts over the next year. "The BSF will prove a long-awaited solution to the space problem that has long challenged the Bodleian," said its head librarian Dr Sarah Thomas. "We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years." The 153 miles of new shelf space will only be enough for the next 20 years however because of the library's historic entitlement to a copy of every volume published in the UK.
and then they digitized it
How many typewritten pages or Libraries of Congresses is that?
How many libraries of Congress does that equal?
"We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years."
I wish my problems allowed for 40 years of procrastination!
I can't see that thing filling up in 20 years. More and more books are being only released in digital format. In 10 years time, I'd hope that easily half of all books were digital only, and tens years past that I'd hope that nearly all books were digital. They're probably going to need to start investing in some snazzy super redundant storage servers instead.
I don't see why they don't scan them into digital format using pdfs, or text files. Keeping a physical copy of all the books they want to is going to become a very overwhelming task. Not to mention if it was digital, the content could be indexed and searched much faster by more people.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Sounds like a fairly generous timeframe.
How much of that space is filled with Harry Potter? Do they get a copy of every revision of every version, including the foreign language versions? That has to be several Rain Forests worth, or at least one Library of Congress.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
they sent their poets to the salt mines, ... in the UK we sent their poetry there instead!
I have read some of the modern poets, a salt mine seems like the best destination for much of what they produced ....
They were helped when the LHC testing at CERN caused a subspace distortion rift into the Unseen University's library on Discworld, so there's more space in that wing than is actually there. It's... quantum. It's actually 153 *thousand* miles of shelf space, so lots of room, but it smells like bananas all the time for some reason.
One of the things the British Library is interested in is keeping books, not data. Books are valuable not only for the content but also may be of interest to future generations because of their typography, layout, binding, other aspects of their physical construction. Also it takes a lot more time and money to scan a book rather than putting it on a bookshelf.
Temps are probably cheaper. And only Americans use interns.
And even so, Oxford is a bit more up to date (anyhow, UNDERWOODS? Olivettis, more like). The temps will type into 1980s wordprocessors and printout will be via IBM Golfball.
THEN the pages will be collated and bound between leather boards between the thighs of young maidens.
Ahem!
ps - Note the use of Latin? :-)
Because technology is fleeting, but paper remains (at least for a few hundred years).
:-(
Consider that the best backup tapes from ten years ago are generally unreadable in most organizations. Nevermind things like Bernoulis, ZIP discs, CDs, 8mm tapes -- it all goes in the junkpile. There is simply no permanent technological solution available at any price. We have a hard time today reading the old NASA tapes from Apollo (and we saved some of that equipment!) Imagine what happens in 2110 when someone wants to find something?
Heck, even the "Digital Doomsday book" lasted only 15 years instead of 1000! http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning
And constantly re-scanning everything in existance every 10 years is not an option.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Dude, get your units right. You can't express miles of shelf space in libraries of congress. The international unit of length is the football field. Not to be confused with the football field as an unit of area.
(Of course, the UK may still stick to their own imperial era units, like the length of a double-decker bus. Or the now largely obsolete cricket pitch.) ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And constantly re-scanning everything in existance every 10 years is not an option. :-(
Probablly the best option at the moment is to keep the data live on servers. As servers become unreliable or uneconomical they get replaced with new ones that store more for a given cost and size. Hard drives are now big enough that this form shouldn't be cost prohibitive. If we assume a megabyte per page (which is way more than needed for most documents) and 1000 pages per book then that is still a couple of thousand books on a modern hard drive!
Formats becoming obsolete is a possible concern but pdf, png, jpeg etc have all been with us for over a decade and have multiple implementations in both closed and open source software so I don't see the ability to read them going away any time soon and if support does start to decline it should be a gradual process with plenty of warning to get the data converted.
Heck, even the "Digital Doomsday book" lasted only 15 years instead of 1000! http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning [guardian.co.uk]
That is partly because it was a construction before it's time and as such relied on some pretty specialised equipment. It was also an interactive system which is always more complex to handle than noninteractive stuff in standard formats.
Had it just relied on a BBC micro i'm sure the roms sites would have kept copies and got it running in emulators no problem. The real problem was the special laserdisk player that the system relied on.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Inevitably an uncontrollable fire will break out and wipe out the entire collection, it's just a matter of time.
They should start donating their collection to other libraries around the world, maybe on a loan basis so that each year or two the books can move around the world and more people can get to read them.
You don't want to end up like the Library of Alexandria, what a loss.
on the now abandoned salt mine.
The archivists finally did manage to decode the Digital Domesday, nine months after your article was written. Still, not every "digital" book is historically significant enough to merit this sort of rescue effort.
because of the library's historic entitlement to a copy of every volume published in the UK.
Is that everything published, even foreign works published in the UK or just things that originated in the U.K.
If so, why does that sound so small?
than a book on a shelf.
Because technology is fleeting, but paper remains (at least for a few hundred years) ... We have a hard time today reading the old NASA tapes ... And constantly re-scanning everything in existance every 10 years is not an option.
Paper is vulnerable to fire, water, mold, etc. Newer paper contains acids resulting in far shorter lifespans than "ancient" paper.
...
NASA made the mistake of not copying the analog tapes to any digital media. IIRC they even intentionally destroyed some tapes by reusing them.
Scanning is a one time event. Once you have a digital copy it is trivial to copy, backup or move to another media or newer device.
While any particular digital media/device may be temporary in nature the Oxford data would most likely be stored in more than one location. Each location independently backing up the data, independently upgrading storage media periodically,
Salt mines don't burn.
A good scanner would solve all your problems. Digitize everything and recycle the paper. All that paper is useless if no one has access to it. How often do people actually go down into the salt mine to retrieve a book?
Why would you rescan?
Scan and store in multiple open formats archived across multiple redundant servers (each contains multiple redundant discs).
Yeah there are technological dead-ends by staying to general purpose hardware, converting data to current formats periodically (like once every other decade) there is no reason a digital archive can't be readable forever.
There is significant cost to physical storage. Temperature & Humidity control isn't cheap and neither are fire prevention & security systems. In 100 years people will look back at how stupid it was to store things in fragile paper which degrades even under optimal conditions.
Oxford Expands Library with 153 miles of shelves, adds 100 janitorial staff and 200 air filtration systems just to dust them off.
Alternatively, 246.229632 kilometers of shelves were added (for those who will only officially recognize the metric system.)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
And you're in the biggest library in the Universe! Look me up!
Because technology is fleeting, but paper remains (at least for a few hundred years).
Indeed, the British Library had it's original copy of the Magna Carta on display last year, that was written in 1215 and was still readable*; admittedly it was velum and not paper but the principle is the same.
*it wasn't understandable, modern english but the individual characters were readable even if I didn't understand it.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Ever try to prop a door open with a DVD?
Have gnu, will travel.
Geez folks, Google is your friend. Check out "Digital Preservation, Planets" to find out that all the major libraries ARE digitizing everything they possibly can. They are also qualifying and choosing digital formats that CAN stand the test of time. If the formats change, the Planets committees will adapt and redo the work. This is not just "they should" but "they are." There is nothing special about paper, it's just was was available at the time. Digital is the next logical progressive step in passing knowledge, reporting the news and reading entertainment. The only thing it has against it right now is that it really only about 20 year old technology. Give it another 100 years, and digital storage will be just as accepted as paper ever was. Paper's time has come and gone. "it's the message, not the media, that is important".
Being in the UK, the University of Oxford would have to pay the people doing grunt work the National Minimum Wage. I believe that organisations trying to use unpaid "interns" are being enthusiastically persued for using illegal labour. Heck! Even illegal imigrants have to be paid the national minimum wage....
Given that its going to cost them, then employing a temp typist will be cheaper in the long run than an unskilled dogsbody (the correct term for "intern" btw). And its easier to get rid of them once that particular project has run its course. After all, it'll be a temporary expedient whilst all those clever buggers break the encryption and DRM that prevent automatic transcoding of e-books into correctly paginated Open Document format files, suitable for proper printing. LaTex output will naturally also be part of the output stream.
Back to this "intern" thing. What the feck IS an "intern"?
I thought it was a medical dogsbody, like a "House Officer". Sounds like some down-on-their-luck Arts graduates have been pimping their CVs again.....
The really trouble isn't technology it is level of comfort. Computers can go tits up for reasons that you don't readily understand or comprehend. When a physical book is destroyed there are indicators or a clear reason for it to occur. This makes people feel they have more control and perceived safety in storing the books in hard copy.
That salt mine might be a safer place than a surface building to house such a wonderful trove of books. I would be happier if they made digital copies and brought the copies to the surface for students and the public to use. The fire that wiped out the ancient great library at Alexandria should be instructive to us in this modern era. So much was lost. It must not happen again.
cat /dev/random >Bodleian
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Probablly the best option at the moment is to keep the data live on servers. As servers become unreliable or uneconomical they get replaced with new ones that store more for a given cost and size. Hard drives are now big enough that this form shouldn't be cost prohibitive. If we assume a megabyte per page (which is way more than needed for most documents) and 1000 pages per book then that is still a couple of thousand books on a modern hard drive!
But it takes power to run those, and then you need worry about HVAC breaking if you want to keep things cool.
Disk is great, but if you want to simply archive stuff I'd go with tape, with 2-3 clones of the image on different media. This way even if 1-2 go bad, you're still good, and you're not using any energy with the tape just sitting in the slot. Disk would be reserved as a cache for recent/often used stuff.
As new tape technology is developed, it's fairly easy (at least with modern backup software) to tell the system to clone stuff from one pool (e.g., LTO-3) to another pool (e.g. LTO-5). This way you're always moving your data forward to a fairly recent technology.
You'd also want to automate verifying the media on a regular basis. ZFS (and btrfs?) can do this well for disks, and similar things can be done with tape.
No, that's actually a worse option than piling books in a salt mine.
I know, because I've done both.
I spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours helping volunteers manually correct the bit-rot in a collection a tiny fraction of this size. How did we do it? We had them open up the old, literally falling apart books and use them to correct the corrupt data in the collections. How did we find which stuff needed correcting? I used grep. Yeah, grep and a bit of scripting around it. So I probably only found a tenth of the corruption.
Every tool, every software product at our disposal for checking data integrity told us those files were 100% intact and had never ever gotten overwritten or modified. Yet, humans could show printouts from 15 years previously that showed different text than the current data. The collection's about 250 years old.
In real life, bit-rot is the manifestation of errors made by humans who then covered up their errors without remediating the effects of those same errors. You can't avoid human mendaciousness.
And you're in the biggest library in the Universe! Look me up!
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Docter redirects here. For the director/animator, see Pete Docter.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
A: book museum
Table-ized A.I.
for my wife's and my book collection, which currently takes up space in every room of our house.
It costs a lot of money and a lot of time to digitise a lot of books. That's why.
They are getting 3 miles of books every year. Yup, they can use the mile as their unit of measurement because the numbers are that great. I think it's something like 250,000 books a year. We're in the middle of a recession and huge economic cuts in the UK, the public sector is being asked to make cuts right now rather than expand operations.
A single warehouse? One fire has the potential to destroy everything--don't forget the Cotton library, or Alexandria...or when the British burned the Library of Congress.
They must have taken over Warehouse 12.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Wanted, lots of mylar bags to make sure it is all preserved in mint condition!!! :-)
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Maybe the next upgrade for them will be a like that one episode of Dr. Who with the library planet. Hopefully without the flesh eating monsters.
If they don't digitize everything, that's sad.
A professor there got me a library card to the Bodleian. It was fascinating to go into the old books room and see books published in the 1600s.
If I remember correctly, it was about 1660 or 1670 when English was close enough to today's English that a modern reader could begin decoding it. Before that, it was a very different language, Old English.