(no subject)
Oh my god.
A building in German collapsed. It had documents dating as far back as 922. I'm just like--what? Before there were four numbers in our numbering of the year?
And this is the craziest part to me--the minutes of every town council meeting in Cologne since 1376 were there. Not a single meeting was missing.
I think that this semester, between doing research and learning about research at the Folger, then taking a potentially-career-changing class on medieval poetry, and taking a heavily historicist, research-based seminar on Shakespeare, I am at a point where the gravity of something like this really begins to resonate, in a horrifying way. I just think--1376! Town council meetings! Think about all the information that would be there--what was important, to whom, how it was dealt with, how it's changed, who went to the meetings, and on and on. The way that stuff works is like, it's there and it's there (...for four hundred years) and nothing happens until someone's like, you know what? I should look at the town council meeting minutes! This will provide ample research! And now..they're gone.
There were 26 people inside the building; all of them managed to leave the building when workers on the roof heard creaks and informed the researchers. Three minutes later, the building was in rubbles. Two people are still missing, from the residential buildings that came down next to the archive. I hope they're ok, and that they'll be getting out soon.
It's supposed to rain tomorrow in Cologne; police are focusing on the two people and covering the building with plastic to protect any archives that might have survived the collapse.
Oh, and also--there was a nuclear-bomb proof room in the basement of the building, for the "most precious documents," presumably the shit that was, like, over a THOUSAND FUCKING YEARS OLD. But in the past few years it's been used to store cleaning supplies. SO AT LEAST THE CLOROX IS SAFE, THANK GOD.
Good lord, this makes the obsessiveness of the librarians at the Folger so, so justified. I mean, it always was, but it really puts into perspective the delicacy and rarity, importance, of the stuff that's there, and the way they use the vault for like FOLIOS instead of MOPS AND BROOMS.
A building in German collapsed. It had documents dating as far back as 922. I'm just like--what? Before there were four numbers in our numbering of the year?
And this is the craziest part to me--the minutes of every town council meeting in Cologne since 1376 were there. Not a single meeting was missing.
I think that this semester, between doing research and learning about research at the Folger, then taking a potentially-career-changing class on medieval poetry, and taking a heavily historicist, research-based seminar on Shakespeare, I am at a point where the gravity of something like this really begins to resonate, in a horrifying way. I just think--1376! Town council meetings! Think about all the information that would be there--what was important, to whom, how it was dealt with, how it's changed, who went to the meetings, and on and on. The way that stuff works is like, it's there and it's there (...for four hundred years) and nothing happens until someone's like, you know what? I should look at the town council meeting minutes! This will provide ample research! And now..they're gone.
There were 26 people inside the building; all of them managed to leave the building when workers on the roof heard creaks and informed the researchers. Three minutes later, the building was in rubbles. Two people are still missing, from the residential buildings that came down next to the archive. I hope they're ok, and that they'll be getting out soon.
It's supposed to rain tomorrow in Cologne; police are focusing on the two people and covering the building with plastic to protect any archives that might have survived the collapse.
Oh, and also--there was a nuclear-bomb proof room in the basement of the building, for the "most precious documents," presumably the shit that was, like, over a THOUSAND FUCKING YEARS OLD. But in the past few years it's been used to store cleaning supplies. SO AT LEAST THE CLOROX IS SAFE, THANK GOD.
Good lord, this makes the obsessiveness of the librarians at the Folger so, so justified. I mean, it always was, but it really puts into perspective the delicacy and rarity, importance, of the stuff that's there, and the way they use the vault for like FOLIOS instead of MOPS AND BROOMS.