Oxford Expands Library With 153 Miles of Shelves 130
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.
LOC (Score:4, Interesting)
How many typewritten pages or Libraries of Congresses is that?
Re:LOC (Score:5, Insightful)
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How many typewritten pages or Libraries of Congresses is that?
The LOC has already been answered for you, but for reference an average book contains around 100,000 words. An average typewritten double-spaced page has about 250 words. So this would be about 2.4 billion typewritten pages, or 1.2 billion if you condensed the typescript by not double-spacing it. Further paper savings could be made by decreasing margins from the standard of 1" on each side (for example, I find 2cm margins on A4 give about 275
The question is (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:The question is (Score:4, Funny)
I believe we owe each other a drink.
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Doesn't work. Congress never did convert to metric.
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Get your units right (Score:2)
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.) ;)
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Re:Get your units right (Score:4, Funny)
Football of course, nobody even mentioned handegg.
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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.
Is that a hundred yards or a hundred meters?
Since the 70's!? (Score:5, Funny)
"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!
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If one had a stack permit, was he working in "the salt mine."
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Well, why not? Don't you people learn Latin in high-schcool any more? When I was a boy, it was compulsory.
But that was so long ago, I no longer know what the Latin is for "get off my lawn".
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My son did. Competed in the National JCL Certamen and did quite well too.
Re:Since the 70's!? (Score:5, Funny)
"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 think those are metric years. They are different than our years.
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I think those are metric years. They are different than our years.
We don't have metric years. A year is unfortunately too far from a power-of-10 seconds to be standardised to a metric unit. Instead we have quarters of a metric quad-year, which is equal to 100,000,000 seconds (126,230,400 being an imperial quad-year[1]).
[1] except unleap-quad-years. An unleap quad-year only occurs every 25 imperial quad-years and are shorter by around three-quarters of a metric day[2][3]
[2] actually, 86,400 seconds, which
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Well, they did eventually do something about the problem, as they could only shelve it for so long.
20 years? (Score:2)
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.
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More and more books? How many books that we give two shits about won't release at least SOME form of physical copy?
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People said the same thing about CDs once.
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EVERY artist started releasing digital copies while ALSO releasing physical media.
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People yammered the same crap 10 years ago when the digital music transition was in its infancy. It would be highly naive to think that books aren't going to end up as digital-only in a couple decades or less.
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If you want to count that as a victory, you go right ahead. ;-)
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They've thought of that. An entire herd of interns will be retyping each ebook on a fleet of Underwood typewriters, then hand-binding them into leather covers.
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If they'd just hire a herd of monkeys instead, given enough time they could retype all books written and all books not yet written as well.
Fewer typos and txt spch than interns, too.
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They might even be able to type up some Shakespeare...
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I've often wondered, how exactly can you have unpaid interns in USA? Don't you have minium wage laws or something? Can they just be ignored if you say "Oh, we'll be hiring INTERNS for this McDonalds job..."
In the USA an internship is an educational experience. Much as we do not pay students to go to school, we do not pay interns. The intern is allowed a chance to experience the real world application of their area of study. If the intern is expected to contribute meaningfully to the business, then they should be paid, otherwise the company is really doing them a service.
Of course, over the years, business has corrupted the internship into an excuse to get free labor out of someone.
The relevant quote is: "In
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In Britain we have minimum wage laws as well, which means that interns have to either be paid the mimimum wage or be paid nothing at all. Incidentally, we do have interns in this country. They are sometimes called Work Experience Boys / Girls.
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There is a lower minimum wage rate for them
Quick fillup (Score:2)
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In 10 years time, I'd hope that easily half of all books were digital only,
...and unless we have a Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense, 10 years later they'll all be unreadable because the DRM-encumbered file format they were stored in is no longer supported.
I don't think physical books will disappear completely in that time frame - they're too iconic - but the typical print run might be "one for Me, one for Mum and Dad, one for each legal deposit library and a couple of spares - everybody else can download". Modern print-on-demand technology makes that feasible.
In any case, with al
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1899: "We just invented a big carriage that can be hooked up to 50 horses! We're gonna be rich rich rich, and even get our loaned house back!"
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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
Digital (Score:2)
They're keeping books not data (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Don't overlook inventory carrying costs. There are costs associated with maintaining the environment the books are stored in. Heating in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, humidity control, maintaining/repairing the structure, etc.
Of course you have the same with digital media, periodically copying to newer media etc. If they had digitized in the 70's a lot of this would be on 8" floppy disks and huge disc packs. Forty years from now they might not be able to find a SD card reader or SATA cont
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It is true that digital archives need to be refreshed to current media however the issue is overblown.
There was roughly 10 years of overlap between 8" and 5.25" discs.
There was about 15 years of overlap between 5.25" and 3.5" discs, and nearly 26 years overlap between 3.5" and optical formats (3.5" was available in 1982 and Sony stopped making media in 2008).
CD and DVD can still be read in current BD drives so that window so conversion is still open.
Likewise CF debuted in 1994 and is still readable today.
Th
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They will start doing that the first time a major archive w/ 10,000 out of print books burned up in a fire.
Cost (Score:2)
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.
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they where storing the books in a salt mine.. that pretty much ensures zero humidity and constant temp across seasons.
just people don't like going to salt mines to read.
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With digital storage, they could fit their entire collection in a single room, and they save things in a totally generic format such as numbered jpgs or even raw bmps. Think raid arrays, and perhaps synced copies at multiple sites in the country. The costs would be negligible compared to physical storage and preservation, and all that money could be put to better use -- like digitising the books and recordings that time hasn't been so kind to.
The real cost is scanning (and particularly getting permission fr
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Re:Digital -- failure (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [guardian.co.uk]
And constantly re-scanning everything in existance every 10 years is not an option.
Re:Digital -- failure (Score:4, Insightful)
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] [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.
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The archivists finally did manage to decode the Digital Domesday [bbc.co.uk], nine months after your article was written. Still, not every "digital" book is historically significant enough to merit this sort of rescue effort.
Digital media fails, not digital itself (Score:2)
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 like
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Not all newer paper is so constructed. Quality modern archival paper is likely to be good for a millennium or more.
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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 syst
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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.
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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 [ox.ac.uk].
The library website implies that they do have digital resources. As for replacing physical with digital, consider that keeping a physical copy of each b
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'cos pdf is shit.
If you want to scan use deja vu.
So 20 years to go digital (Score:2)
Sounds like a fairly generous timeframe.
How much (Score:1)
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.
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Lucky you, she must not have every unauthorized biography and "reference" book.
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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.
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The German national library is entitled to three copies and they keep them. I don't see why they would _not_ keep them....
Salt mines sound perfect. Salt mines guarantee, by the very existence of the salt, that they are pretty stable over geological time-spans.
In soviet russia ... (Score:5, Funny)
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 ....
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Easy (Score:4, Funny)
I call dibs... (Score:2)
Entitlement (Score:2)
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?
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Just things that originate in the UK and in the Republic of Ireland.
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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, whi
How safe is that? (Score:1)
You need a good scanner (Score:1)
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?
Re:You need a good scanner (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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Paper in a mine doesn't need a farad cage to exist after the Goldeneye hits.
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I live and breathe computers and the fact that you want to _destroy_ the original sources tells me that you don't.
And even if you copy to new tapes every five years, just have civilsation collapse for a few dozen years and... Yay... Papyrus and paper records survived hundreds and thousands of years. Stone and clay records longer than that.
Mo' shelves, mo' problems (Score:2)
Alternatively, 246.229632 kilometers of shelves were added (for those who will only officially recognize the metric system.)
I'm the Doctor (Score:1)
Doctor: disambiguation (Score:2)
And you're in the biggest library in the Universe! Look me up!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor [wikipedia.org]
Docter redirects here. For the director/animator, see Pete Docter.
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Books rule! (Score:2)
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Ever try to prop a door open with a DVD?
Fail. The correct digital medium to prop open a door with is a hard disk. Preferably with the case partially removed so that visitors can see the platters. That's what I have my office door propped open with right now.
Remember Alexandria? (Score:2)
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.
Q: Whaddya call a library in 2020? (Score:2)
A: book museum
That should be just enough room (Score:2)
Where they got the space (Score:2)
They must have taken over Warehouse 12.
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I rather hope (and suspect) they've got better fire suppression systems than the Library of Alexandria.
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There are also copies at the British Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales and the university libraries of Cambridge and Dublin, so if one set is lost, we still have the others.
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Nevermind the overhead costs of transporting that many items, coordinating the transports, and ensuring that the materials stay in controlled environments the whole time. Also conveniently ignore the facts that librarians have learned a thing or two about preservation in the past two thousand years, and that engineers have produced better fire-control systems, and that there's more to storage than just lots of shelf space.
Ignore the past thousand years of progress, and this is indeed a serious risk. Otherwi
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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.
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Print runs are a lot bigger than back in Alexandria's day. The authors themselves probably have plenty of spare copies of even good books. If the Bodlean burned, they could just sent out a general request that all authors or their publishers send another copy.
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Hows about a mind that's completely closed??
Yes, digitize. (Score:2)
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.