Reading the article, it sounds like maybe they don’t have air conditioning? They talk about how the warming climate is increasing their breeding cycles, and they’ve mostly dealt with mild problems in the past. How hard would it be to retrofit here? It seems like a easy fix to a lot of their problems. I assume there’s some reason it’s not done.
https://apnews.com/article/hungary-library-abbey-beetle-infe... < original source, so you don't need to read shit like: "Workers are racing to save 100,000 books from a rare beetle infestation inside Hungary's 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey, a UNESCO World Hertiage site."
I've visited that library. It's a high-ceiling architectural joy, but unless you're deeply, deeply into repetitive religious tracts of 600 years ago, most of the collection is more of a curiosity than a valuable resource to modern scholars.
To answer @Amerzarak's question, the abbey is in a rural setting without an immediate surrounding community of researchers or urban resources. So, yes, no air-conditioning. The floors are polished; the ticket-takers are friendly, and the guides have a handful of stories that they tell well. For aesthetics, it would be nice if they can preserve everything. But in terms of scholarly impact, this wouldn't be on my list of the world's 1,000 historic collections most worth preserving in their entirety.
Books could be sent through medical device gamma radiation conveyer belts to kill off the bugs. Eg the Institute of Isotopes in Budapest or the BGS facility in Germany for higher volume.
I wish there was a central way to track the books that have never been scanned or translated— just to show the work we have to do. My guess is that the majority of Neo-Latin works are unscanned and untranslated.
Even recent works might be both unscanned and untranslated.
I experienced this when the only way to access a 70 years old scientific paper written in Italian was by finding a copy in a library and scanning it. There are not many existing copies of the journal left, in a few decades it might have been lost forever.
I agree with the global warming bit. Living in Hungary all my life, the temperature seems to be absurdly high. We used to have four distinct seasons which are not so distinct anymore. There is essentially no snow during winter anymore. When I was younger, our winter were truly cold and it has been snowing for weeks. Now, there is no snow at all. I have not seen a white (snowy) Christmas in a long time, unfortunately.
Our summers are getting unbearable, and there are many apartments where you will not get a permit for ACs as they require some repairments because from what I heard, the cables or whatever can't handle the ACs. So... I am left here with a fan that is not enough anymore, and I cannot get a permit for an AC. It is going to be a tough summer.
Drugstore beetles are also a huge problem for natural history museums because they will eat all kinds of biological materials like dried plants. I am curator of a medium sized herbarium and we have been fighting beetles since 1945. PDB (paradichlorobenze; moth balls) used to be a very effective way to keep beetles out of collections, but most institutions no longer allow its use. Freezing specimens is what we do now, and it is very effective in the short term, but it has to be repeated at least every few years and it also causes some wear on the specimens. During COVID lockdowns when some specimens were not frozen regularly, the results were devastating. Pressed flowers reduced to dust, trays of pinned butterflies completely gone, only beetle grass left behind.
Once you have these beetles they come back again and again. The only really good long term solution is to store everything in what is essentially a giant walk-in refrigerator. ...or if the specimens are old enough, they may have been treated with mercury or arsenic, which is quite effective but has other problems!
Where are the AI bros? Hurry up and throw money at this. Nature is the ultimate gatekeeper. They care not for copyright. The Supreme Court can't force the beetles to spit back the data. Once you train on it nobody else can.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 12.3 ms ] thread(The beetles are probably one of the most common minor pests you can find in a pantry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugstore_beetle )
To answer @Amerzarak's question, the abbey is in a rural setting without an immediate surrounding community of researchers or urban resources. So, yes, no air-conditioning. The floors are polished; the ticket-takers are friendly, and the guides have a handful of stories that they tell well. For aesthetics, it would be nice if they can preserve everything. But in terms of scholarly impact, this wouldn't be on my list of the world's 1,000 historic collections most worth preserving in their entirety.
I experienced this when the only way to access a 70 years old scientific paper written in Italian was by finding a copy in a library and scanning it. There are not many existing copies of the journal left, in a few decades it might have been lost forever.
Our summers are getting unbearable, and there are many apartments where you will not get a permit for ACs as they require some repairments because from what I heard, the cables or whatever can't handle the ACs. So... I am left here with a fan that is not enough anymore, and I cannot get a permit for an AC. It is going to be a tough summer.
Once you have these beetles they come back again and again. The only really good long term solution is to store everything in what is essentially a giant walk-in refrigerator. ...or if the specimens are old enough, they may have been treated with mercury or arsenic, which is quite effective but has other problems!