Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Thousands of pages from one of the world’s biggest collections of historic books, pamphlets and periodicals are to be made available on the Internet.
You can read the full story here.
This is a good thing and also is very much in keeping with the very reason for the existence of the library itself. The very concept of a library is to provide access to knowledge for everyone. However, beyond that, it is also (I suggest) one more step towards a more rational culture for us all.
(OK, tongue placed firmly in cheek, but stick with me here, I have a skeptical point coming up later on)
Folks not in the UK might be wondering what this is about, so as a quick aside I better explain. In the UK if the press catch you doing something you should not have been doing (think shenanigans one night with a supermodel), you can take out a legal injunction to prevent publication. However, what can then happen is that the press can be a bit sneaky and report that there is an injunction in place that prevents them reporting something and so they name names without actually saying what happened. To prevent this, there is the concept of what is now known as a super-injunction to prevent them reporting on the very existence of the injunction. To do that costs about £50K.