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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.
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.
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."
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
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".
Football of course, nobody even mentioned handegg.