The Next Age of Discovery

"It's being called a second Renaissance!" said Todd Hickey, curator at University of California, Berkeley. This fascinating article by Alexandra Alter in Wall Street Journal 8 May 2009 tells of the race to digitise crumbling literary treasures. Rare manuscripts are being digitised from out of the way monasteries and some made available for research for the first time. Perhaps it's the historian in me that excites me most about all of this. So much in the past has been destroyed by war and climate but we now have the possibility of preserving it!