![]() ![]() But I was afraid to look pedantic so I got to work on drying it.īack in 1980 I was already alive but I was only two years old. Should we save first those journals with the highest impact factor? or should we work on those that are most relevant to our own research? Should we throw away Chemical Abstracts now that the whole database is online? After all, New Scientist is a magazine which summarizes research that has already been peer reviewed and published it is journalistic work, not peer reviewed science. When I noticed the title in my hand I wanted to switch it. I got an item that corresponded to the British journal New Scientist, which consisted of about fifteen issues from the year 1980. Everyone grabbed an item and with the help of industrial blow dryers – the kind we use in chemistry labs to dry wet glassware – and an extraordinary amount of paper towels, each person got to dry the journals page by page. Not only saving the information was important wet paper is a great culture media for fungi which in turn could pose a health threat to all users. The administrative staff immediately got to work in recruiting academics and students to help the drying process: “ Heal a book!“, they informally called it. It is now the books the ones that suffer the aftermath of this accident. The broken pipe has been fixed and the water on the floor has been mopped. ![]() This morning the librarians were appalled when noticed not only the huge puddle on the floor but all the books and scientific journals that were dripping water from the shelves. When it comes to scientific journals, our institute still relies a lot on paper issues for the oldest numbers we can order them online but it’s just easier to Xerox it at the library if you really need to read that old reference. ![]() During the past weekend the library at the institute of chemistry suffered a flood caused by a broken pipe just above it, which incidentally happens to be the lab were I used to work as an undergrad student. If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, then wasting a collective mind is an even more terrible thing. ![]()
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