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.
Re:Since the 70's!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The question is (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LOC (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The question is (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't work. Congress never did convert to metric.
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 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...
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.
Re:How much (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Digital -- failure (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:20 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.