Skip to main content

Books for All!

Here's a bit of interesting news for history buffs.  Apparently, rare and ancient texts owned by the Vatican and the Bodleian Library are going to be put into digital form and made available for public study.  This amounts to something like 1.5 million pages of previously largely unseen documents, which include works on the kabbalah, the Talmud, Hebrew manuscripts and the Gutenburg Bible.

I wonder who decides which texts to share and which to keep private, and why?  Conspiracy theorists could have a field day, pondering over alleged plots to retain the world's Really Big Secrets for a small elite.

Personally, I've found the best place to hide something is in plain sight. 

Thinking back to my time as a library assistant in the Religion and Philosophy Library, at Liverpool's Central Library, I can easily remember the thousands upon thousands of books stored away in the stacks.  Wouldn't it be great if each and every one of those - and all those like them, stashed away in libraries all over the world - were available in digital form for absolutely everyone to read?  It is theoretically possible, though it would be a huge task.   

Is there a gadget which can scan whole pages into a digital book format of some kind?  This way, the text wouldn't have to be re-typed.  A person would have to be able to read Latin, Greek or Hebrew though (or whichever old language a text happened to be in), - or else rely on those dodgy online translators which tend to be hit-and-miss. 

Today, we have ready access to more information than at any time in recorded history.  How we use that, and how we develop that, will be interesting to observe.


Share   Subscribe
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time.  This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.  In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.  But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself.  Folklore and myt...
15 comments
Read more

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine.  A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...
Post a Comment
Read more