Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The Cologne archive

Cologne had an important archive. Its material was not digitised. Because of a mishap during the building of a new underground route, the archive was destroyed.

The archive of Cologne was important. Several scientist are now stuck. The collection is deemed to be destroyed beyond repair.

PLEASE DIGITISE OUR HERITAGE.
Thanks,
      GerardM

No more libraries of Alexandria

2 comments:

Piotr Konieczny said...

Voice in the wild? I am just waiting for a major museum or such to be nuked to the ground... I am afraid little will showcase the importance of digitizing to the world other then losing some major cultural artifact...

Was the story picked up by traditional media? Would be interesting to see what they wrote about it. Does the archive has an article on Wikipedia?

Anonymous said...

I spent much of my life pretty near the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne. Had not illness postponed the project, I could have easily been there at the time of collapse, sighting estates of a researcher of historic states of the local Colognian language.

It becomes more and more evident that unbelievable neglicence of many of people and organisations caused the havoc. They say in the media, while recataloguing the pieces rescued from the 28 metres deep pit, everything shall be digitized. They also say, restauration of damaged documents safed up to now (only a fraction) will take some 30 years or more, provided restorers in the Northwest of Germany do not much else in the future.

Digitizing is not all, but at least it is a way to keep the more obvious part of information, and permit cheap access to it in the future.