The fire damaged 15% of the funds INION Scientific Library in Moscow. Digitization of books about money not allocated

In the night from Friday to Saturday in Moscow burned library of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences. 38 firefighters extinguished calculations building most of the night. Burned 2,000 square meters, part of the roof collapsed. The library contains 14 million books and documents, including rare editions XVI - early XX centuries. Fire and water damaged 15% of the funds , but scientists hope that most of the damaged copies could save.



According to the director Yuri INION Pivovarova, library funds almost digitized, because it does not allocate money. Fortunately, most of the contents of the library does not exist in a single copy, there are many foreign publications, which are digitized abroad. The preliminary cause of the fire - a short circuit. For a full repair and replacement of wiring money is also not enough. For several years, rumors , that the institution wants to move somewhere far away from the center to make a convenient site near Metro UNION. President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Forts, visit the fire, said , that neither he or firefighters do not consider the version of arson.

The problem of full digitization of all documents, manuscripts and folios, including the most rare, is not solved on a global scale. Many libraries, especially in rich and technologically advanced countries, gradually transferred the funds into a digital form. Technically this is not a very difficult task - modern книжные scanners are fast and very delicately, manually have to scan only the most dilapidated copies. There is another problem - the lack of money for this important, but non-urgent and non-profit business, and legal obstacles , which make it impossible to access free or low-cost subscribe to services of digital libraries. So that each occurrence of the network in digital form the next part of the funds of the best libraries becomes a big event.



Source: geektimes.ru/post/245122/