LISNews: Librarian News

madcow writes ""For seventy years, a prayer book moldered in the closet of a family in France, passed down from one generation to the next. Its mildewed parchment pages were stiff and contorted, tarnished by burn marks and waxy smudges. Behind the text of the prayers, faint Greek letters marched in lines up the page, with an occasional diagram disappearing into the spine...
For this was not just a prayer book. The faint Greek inscriptions and accompanying diagrams were, in fact, the only surviving copies of several works by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes...An intensive research effort over the last nine years has led to the decoding of much of the almost-obliterated Greek text. The results were more revolutionary than anyone had expected. The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized. Fascinating story here.""

(ed-For variety's sake, I tried to find a story--key word: book--on something other than Harry Potter. But this is the one that turned up, and I have to report it...)

Never mind about HP7, now there's a rare edition of Harry Potter (first edition), and it's being sold to raise money for the Oxfam UK . BBC has the story.

A team of archivists and preservationists is hard at work in Washington DC with librarians and museum personnel from around the country. Thanks to a grant from the non-profit Heritage Foundation and the IMLS, they are learning the how-to's of preserving fragile, time and temperature-worn documents.

A recent survey, following the destruction evidenced by Hurricane Katrina, showed the following:

*More than half of the country's 30,000 libraries, museums and archives have had articles that were damaged by moisture

*26 percent of collecting institutions have no environmental controls, including 40 percent of libraries.

*80 percent of collections have no disaster plan

More on the current summit from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Access North Georgia and WV Gazette.

The Belfast Telegraph reports that the British Library recently unveiled Turning the Pages 2.0 - a 3D system that allows people to explore digitized versions of books and manuscripts. A competition is being held among public libraries throughout the United Kingdom to find items in their collections that most deserve to be converted into 'virtual texts' and posted for the public to view on the British Library's website.