Rare King James Bible First Edition Discovered at Drew University | Hacker News Reader

Rare King James Bible First Edition Discovered at Drew University

artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

37 pointsdiodorus7 comments

I guess I am more excited by the idea they have so many books that are not currently cataloged. There to be thousands of similar collections around the world. How much history do we miss out on simply because it now collects dust, the tech is there all we are missing is the need and money

Even when books are cataloged, they can still be missed. Renaissance dance manuals are rare, they talk about etiquette, and etiquette books are much more common. There's been at least one dance manual that was never examined by a dance historian until a researcher with a hunch looked at all of the books classified as etiquette books.

In another case a dance manuscript written around 1500 AD sat in a pile of papers on a guy's desk for a decade because it looked like it was a music manuscript -- much more common, no hurry to catalog another one.

The issue is more complex than digital access, although that would help a lot. The importance of a book may not be recognized until it is reviewed by experts, and experts are a rare resource. For example, very few people have knowledge about ancients documents in greek, latin, coptic, and related languages. Even if they had access to all libraries in the world it would take a long time to recognize what is new and what is just another copy of a well known book. To make matters even more complex, some books have been copied on top of even more ancient documents. Understanding when this happened and what was there is another difficult problem to solve.

Those examples are similar to my music/dance and etiquette/dance examples from the Renaissance -- dance scholars are much rarer than music scholars.

It is speeding up with digital storage.

Who knows what those Zip drives has on them?

Well, since magnetic media has a very finite lifetime, you don't have much longer to worry about Zip disks -- they'll all be unreadable soon.

Which brings me to another fun story. My girlfriend runs a book conservation lab, and she was wondering if she should try to read the bits on a floppy disk associated with a book on numerical methods -- it costs $$ to try to read the disk, and given the age, it was unlikely to work. I know one of the book authors, so I told her I likely could probably find a copy of the software on the Internet, if she found some pages that listed the names of the software functions. Turned out that it was a copy of LAPACK, which is available at NETLIB. Only one checkin to the code since the book was published in 1986...

That thought literally (almost) keeps me up at night.

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