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It's a basic principle of fire safety engineering – paper requires a concentration of more than 14.1% oxygen to allow combustion to occur. Considering that pap

by jperras 11y ago

It's a basic principle of fire safety engineering – paper requires a concentration of more than 14.1% oxygen to allow combustion to occur. Considering that paper composes the majority of the mass in that installation, a sustained hypoxic environment at 14% or below is exactly how this system should be designed. If the papers were separated into separate warehouses, they would still all have the same environmental requirements. Additionally, you require N times more budget, where N is the number of warehouses you've constructed (not to mention the difficulty in querying physically distributed warehouses for information). > I don't understand why this is a problem. Scan them to pdf files, and put them on web pages. Let google index them. Before making such broad, sweeping statements, perhaps read up a bit on the principles of information science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science Edit: You are editing your comment every few minutes, so I don't know what to reply to anymore.

WalterBright 11y ago
Ships have hulls to keep the water out, too, but sometimes the water gets in and they sink. I can think of dozens of ways the archive could still burn. Here's just one: large earthquake breaks open the building, cuts electric power, breaks gas lines, fire starts. Firemen are overwhelmed and give priority to saving civilians in other buildings, stacks of newspapers are at the bottom of their list. Another: Fire starts in building next door. Wind whipped flames set the archive on fire from the outside. Archive burns down with everything in it. A third: bunch of militants take over that part of town. Set fire to the archive because they are opposed to history. Not like that has never happened before, like in ISIS controlled Iraq, and the great fire of Alexandria. It's the classic eggs-in-one-basket scenario.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  At least its a good basket, in a reasonable place, with safeguards in place. Two or three 9's more likely to work than...doing nothing.
- jperras 11y ago
  > Ships have hulls to keep the water out, too, but sometimes the water gets in and they sink. I can think of dozens of ways the archive could still burn. Sure, but we still build most ships with double hulls (being extra safe is not a bad thing), and when transporting important goods we generally don't split them up among several cargo ships just in case one hits an iceberg.
WalterBright 11y ago
>> I don't understand why this is a problem. Scan them to pdf files, and put them on web pages. Let google index them. > Before making such broad, sweeping statements, perhaps read up a bit on the principles of information science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science By putting the data in a standard form, like pdf, and making it available to anyone, i.e. put it on web pages, then any organization can devise an organizational and retrieval methodology and apply it. It is completely unnecessary for the archivists to do so, and it should not be blocking them in any way. Google is just one such example.

by jperras 11y ago

WalterBright 11y ago

Ships have hulls to keep the water out, too, but sometimes the water gets in and they sink. I can think of dozens of ways the archive could still burn. Here's just one: large earthquake breaks open the building, cuts electric power, breaks gas lines, fire starts. Firemen are overwhelmed and give priority to saving civilians in other buildings, stacks of newspapers are at the bottom of their list. Another: Fire starts in building next door. Wind whipped flames set the archive on fire from the outside. Archive burns down with everything in it. A third: bunch of militants take over that part of town. Set fire to the archive because they are opposed to history. Not like that has never happened before, like in ISIS controlled Iraq, and the great fire of Alexandria. It's the classic eggs-in-one-basket scenario.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
At least its a good basket, in a reasonable place, with safeguards in place. Two or three 9's more likely to work than...doing nothing.
jperras 11y ago
> Ships have hulls to keep the water out, too, but sometimes the water gets in and they sink. I can think of dozens of ways the archive could still burn. Sure, but we still build most ships with double hulls (being extra safe is not a bad thing), and when transporting important goods we generally don't split them up among several cargo ships just in case one hits an iceberg.

WalterBright 11y ago

>> I don't understand why this is a problem. Scan them to pdf files, and put them on web pages. Let google index them. > Before making such broad, sweeping statements, perhaps read up a bit on the principles of information science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science By putting the data in a standard form, like pdf, and making it available to anyone, i.e. put it on web pages, then any organization can devise an organizational and retrieval methodology and apply it. It is completely unnecessary for the archivists to do so, and it should not be blocking them in any way. Google is just one such example.