-----Original Message-----
From: Unidroit-L@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Unidroit-L@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of jlueke_2000
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 7:16 PM
To: Unidroit-L@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Unidroit-L] Re: Collapse of Cologne archive building

I hope all the people are found and that they are OK.

As for the material, it really makes a lot of sense to scan this type of material and store it on the web where it's much more liklely to survive.

--- In Unidroit-L@yahoogroups.com, "gat62" <greg_terzian@...> wrote:
>
> This is a terrible tragedy and raises the question of whether it is best to concentrate important cultural collections in just a few locations or disburse them more broadly. Also recall the destruction of the vase collection at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens by the 1999 earthquake (which some later reports claimed could have been largely prevented by less than one hundred dollars worth of sealing wax to secure the vases).
>
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5846343.ece
>
> "Some of Germany's most valuable documentary treasures may have been destroyed, wiped out in the three minutes it took for a six-storey building to become a pile of smouldering brickwork yesterday afternoon."
>
> The private papers of the Nobel prize-winning novelist Heinrich Böll, one of Germany's most powerful postwar writers, have been lost under the rubble."
>
> "Letters written by the philosopher Hegel, lyrics and notes written by the composer Jacques Offenbach – who composed The Tales of Hoffmann – edicts issued by Napoleon and King Louis XIV, and the personal papers of Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first Chancellor and former mayor of Cologne, were also lost."
>
> "We are talking here about 18 kilometres of extremely valuable archival material, of absolute importance to European culture," Eberhard Illner, the head of the city archives, said. "Now the memory of a European city has been destroyed. I can only hope, but cannot believe, that some of these fragile documents survived under tonnes of concrete and steel."
>
> "The archives included the minutes of all town council meetings held since 1376. Not a single session had been missed, making the collection a remarkable resource for legal historians."
>
> "The earliest document stored in the building dated back to 922, and there were hundreds of thousands of documents spread over six floors, some of them written on thin parchment. A total of 780 complete private collections and half a million photographs were being stored."
>