I wonder if IR imaging can be used to read the books burned in 1944 by the German army at the Krasiński Library in Warsaw [1].

Many manuscripts among them were never reproduced. A random example: Jan Ostroróg's chess primer written between 1602 and 1610, where he supposedly invented the algebraic notation (a-h 1-8) over a hundred years before Philipp Stamma, to whom it is usually credited [2, in Polish].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_book_urn.jpg [2] https://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/Encyklopedia_staropolska/Szac...