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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.
"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!
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 ....
Wikipedia claims 21 million volumes in the LOC, so this would be roughly 0.27LOC. 6 Million volumes is not particularly large - even now it will only hold half of the current Bodleian collection.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
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."
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
Football of course, nobody even mentioned handegg.