Time to split up the National Archives amongst the fifty States.

--- In Unidroit-L@yahoogroups.com, "Dave Welsh" <dwelsh46@...> wrote:
>
> Speaking only as a contributor to the list:
>
> This disaster makes it clear that there is significant value in dispersion.
>
> Centralized control of ancient materials necessarily means that they must be
> stored in relatively few locations, where they are vulnerable to natural
> disasters or to custodial misconduct. It has unfortunately become clear that
> while natural disasters do not occur frequently they can be extremely
> devastating, whilst custodial misconduct occurs more frequently than most
> people would imagine might be possible.
>
> It isn't wise to place all of society's eggs in one basket - regardless of
> one's ideology.
>
> Dave Welsh
>
> www.classicalcoins.com
>
> service@...
>
>
>
> -----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@yahoogro <mailto:Unidroit-L%40yahoogroups.com> ups.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.timesonl
> <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5846343.ece>
> ine.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."
> >
>