Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save 100,000 books from a beetle infestation
-
PANNONHALMA, Hungary — Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being pulled from the shelves of a medieval abbey in Hungary in an effort to save them from a beetle infestation that could wipe out centuries of history.
-
PANNONHALMA, Hungary — Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being pulled from the shelves of a medieval abbey in Hungary in an effort to save them from a beetle infestation that could wipe out centuries of history.
They didn't make digital backups?
-
They didn't make digital backups?
Digitalisation is a pretty large investment, and libraries typically have pretty tight budgets, so outside of governmental (or philantropic) intervention I assume it might happen very slowly or not at all. Old books are very fragile, so any intervention must be done very carefully.
And outside of that... while the contents can be saved with digitalisation, there is value in the object itself, and that's what they are trying to protect. They won't just abandon the items they protected for centuries because the text has been moved to another format.