https://www.medievalists.net/?s=digitizing&submit=Search
I wonder what the cost of this digitization process would be and what research labs can render this service.
Post it on the web. Lots of people will inevitably make copies, ensuring its survival.
To my knowledge, digitalization can be expensive, because they need hardware for high quality scans, and they have to be careful not to damage these books any further. I guess it all depends on the situation.
And from the look of the picture those books are massive and probably very delicate.
EDIT: to add a bit to the expensive part of this, it's expensive even with the willingness and resources to get it done, it's hard but unfortunately to even convince someone to dedicate these resources is a hurdle.
Before anyone says "this will never work! It must be done by $$$$$ professionals! It requires $$$$ equipment!" just pick a book, any book, off your bookshelf, open it up, and take a phone photo.
P.S. It works better with daylight providing enough light through the windows.
- Need to make sure the photographers are careful not to damage fragile pages
- Need a system of organization (syncing ten thousand default-named iphone pics with no labels is not ideal)
- You might be ignoring important differences between modern published books on your bookshelf and these materials (ex. maybe font is not same size, maybe font is not modern English, maybe characters are not printed consistently, maybe pages are dirty, all of which could impact OCR-friendliness of an iphone pic compared to something else
- There might even be valuable information in markings below the topmost visible layer which could be revealed by scanning equipment (especially for example if pages are stuck together)
And that's just off the top of my head, without real domain knowledge.
But indeed, as long as you have some images you can dump then onto the Internet Archive for immediate posterity (and hope they don't go under when the lawsuit determines a penalty).
Who knows what lies underneath the top layers of usage?
Texts were copied laboriously by hand. Each one carrys stories of where it came from. It could inform trade links from monastic scribe houses across the globe. It could have DNA fragments of value.
It almost certainly has pictures of cats in it, somewhere. Doing strange things with snails.
The only ones that survived are the small ones which were never converted, and which you can still find around the city.
It was done in the name of rationality since religion does not exist for them, meant to free the people from gods. As end result, those theaters were private and got abandoned.
Those shopping malls are now the new churches of a society that now instead of worshiping a god in heavens is worshiping the god of money. It would have been saner to respect old churches and preserve our patrimony/cultural heritage.
I keep the valuable books on a special shelf so that after I die, my kids will know that those books should probably not be sent to the library book sale.
Also love old maps.
Does your local weather cooperate or hinder your collection ?
This discovery is very exciting. The manuscripts pictured in the article look like music partitures.
