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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.
How many typewritten pages or Libraries of Congresses is that?
"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 believe we owe each other a drink.
Don't you mean metric Libraries of Congresses? Not everyone is forced to use archaic English units like in the States. ;)
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Doesn't work. Congress never did convert to metric.
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."
Temp implies "temporary" but they still get paid. Interns are unpaid. Where did you learn English, Cambridge?
Given their hundreds of years of experience with an ever-growing collection, I'm confident they know what they're getting themselves into. Consider that their historical entitlement to receive a copy of each book published in the UK dates back to the early 1600s.
The library website implies that they do have digital resources. As for replacing physical with digital, consider that keeping a physical copy of each book is not only nice for continuing the historic archive, but also negates the technical unknowns of maintaining a massive archive of scans for (what I'm sure they hope will be) hundreds more years into the future. Who knows what the digital landscape will look like in hundreds of years...
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
I expect the Bodlein library has a retention policy not unlike the the Library of Congress's. They're entitled to receive copies, but not every copy is kept.
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.
Both the British Library and Cambridge University library have similar collections*, if a fire was to break out the only things that would be truly lost would be rare ancient items unique to the Bodlean which will have already been extensively studied, copied and transcribed - just the one-off item would be lost, and there's not much that can be done about that until we invent replicators.
*Like the Bodlean they also receive copies of every book published.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
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?
The British Library has a copy of the Magna carta from 1215, I saw it on display last year & it was perfectly readable being written on velum. OTOH digitisation has given me a box full of useless floppy disks that I can't read due to the fact that my computer no longer has a floppy drive; there's no point getting a USB floppy as the data on these disks is meant for my dads old Atati ST. I'll stick with the technology that's proven to last a thousand years rather than the one that has failed to last even 30.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
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".
rather than the one that has failed to last even 30.
The Magna Carta didn't survive because it was left out in somebody's barn for 800 years. Take care of your stuff over the generations and it'll last.
Computer generations are faster, but I think the bigger problem is that we've been able to keep more stuff than we could store until just about now. I'm putting together a little 5x1.5TB ZFS box for home, and I don't think I have the data to fill it. That's a first. But I guess it's like having 153 miles of shelving. Come to think of it, I've got Rubbermaid totes out in the shed with books I don't have shelfspace for...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Football of course, nobody even mentioned handegg.
More and more books are being only released in digital format.
Name a single one that is relevant, by which I mean it has either:
1) made it into a best seller list somewhere
2) been a recommended text on an academic course somewhere
3) been recommended by a well-known newspaper or magazine
Because believe me, if a book doesn't hit at least one of those criteria, almost nobody cares about it. Because almost nobody's heard of it.
While I agree that ebooks are, in fact, the future, and that the future is now very nearly here (the screen on the Kindle 3 is a thing of beauty compared to past devices, for example), this doesn't mean dead trees are yet -- well -- dead. The market for dead tree books is in the order of ten times larger than the market for ebooks, and given current expansion rates, it seems likely that they will become equal at some point in the next ten years. Beyond that point, expansion of ebook sales is likely to start slowing down, and it will be a while after that before any serious mainstream publisher starts considering not selling physical copies of their books.
Is that everything published, even foreign works published in the UK or just things that originated in the U.K.
AIUI, it is everything that is published in the UK. This includes foreign works in cases where there is an organisation acting as a publisher in the UK, but not if the publisher is outside the UK and retailers import directly from them.
If so, why does that sound so small?
Because unlike the US Library of Congress or the British Museum, the Bodleian only gets the stuff they specifically request, which appears to be around a quarter of the total that is actually published from what I can work out.