Cambridge University Says Darwin's Iconic Notebooks Were Stolen (nbcnews.com) 52
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Two notebooks written by the famed British naturalist Charles Darwin in 1837 and missing for years may have been stolen from the Cambridge University Library, according to curators who launched a public appeal Tuesday for information. The notebooks, estimated to be worth millions of dollars, include Darwin's celebrated "Tree of Life" sketch that the 19th-century scientist used to illustrate early ideas about evolution. Officials at the Cambridge University Library say the two notebooks have been missing since 2001, and it's now thought that they were stolen.
"I am heartbroken that the location of these Darwin notebooks, including Darwin's iconic 'Tree of Life' drawing, is currently unknown, but we're determined to do everything possible to discover what happened and will leave no stone unturned during this process," Jessica Gardner, the university librarian and director of library services, said in a statement. The lost manuscripts were initially thought to have been misplaced in the university's enormous archives, which house roughly 10 million books, maps and other objects. But an exhaustive search initiated at the start of 2020 -- the "largest search in the library's history," according to Gardner -- failed to turn up the notebooks and they are now being reported as stolen. Cambridge University officials said a police investigation is underway and the notebooks have been added to Interpol's database of stolen artworks.
"I am heartbroken that the location of these Darwin notebooks, including Darwin's iconic 'Tree of Life' drawing, is currently unknown, but we're determined to do everything possible to discover what happened and will leave no stone unturned during this process," Jessica Gardner, the university librarian and director of library services, said in a statement. The lost manuscripts were initially thought to have been misplaced in the university's enormous archives, which house roughly 10 million books, maps and other objects. But an exhaustive search initiated at the start of 2020 -- the "largest search in the library's history," according to Gardner -- failed to turn up the notebooks and they are now being reported as stolen. Cambridge University officials said a police investigation is underway and the notebooks have been added to Interpol's database of stolen artworks.
Not this again (Score:2)
Curators not giving a flying feck about stuff they need to curate.
This is not the first story about very valuable writings being stolen, and the fact being discovered years, if not decades later.
Re:Not this again (Score:5, Insightful)
In all fairness, it went missing decades ago, they were just hoping that it was misplaced.
Have you been to any of the great university libraries? Those places are huge, and have huge collections.
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They shouldn't have gotten misplaced in the first place.
Yes, I have been to libraries, yes, they are huge, but I also know best practice is to arrange books in tiers by importance.
There's the small subset of critically important books that you absolutely MUST keep an eye on due to their value. A large library can have up to 10K such volumes. They should be in perfect order and accounted for at least once a month. Those very, very, VERY valuable (up to 500 items) should be checked at least daily. You don't w
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Even on those terms, a full stocktake of 10k items every month would take somewhere between 6 and 10 people in full-time employment with no other duties. But actually you're out by orders of magnitude. Add up the figures in the list of rare book collections of the CUL [cam.ac.uk] and you get about 330k not including the Jennings portrait collection, but those figures don't include anything for the books which were in the library before 1715 (another 10k+), or the books which publishers were required to send the library
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Bar codes, or perhaps RFID. 3 seconds per item, 1200 an hour, 9600 in an 8 hour shift for one person.
It is trivial to swap a barcode.
But let's say the find a book is missing. Then what? Do they push a magic button to make it reappear?
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I imagine it's easy to underestimate the difficulty in working with things at this scale if you haven't worked with giant university collections, as I have. It's not like there's a bookshelf with 10000 books on it. These things are packed away in bins, boxes, envelopes, often in secure facilities, remote archives, or any number of other locations. Many of them are not physically grouped semantically as the logistics of doing so often make it impossible. Not everything fits in one bin, so you split it up. Yo
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Also, scanning barcodes for 8 hours straight is not something that a skilled career librarian with a master's degree in information science would be willing to do as part of their regular duties. If you were giving some intern unsupervised access to all of these valuable things every month that would kind of defeat the purpose of counting them every month.
Not this paper again (Score:2)
Or one can use the actual paper as a form of identification.
https://insights.globalspec.co... [globalspec.com]
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8 hours x 60 minutes = 480 minutes in a work day / 500 items = 0.96 items to check per minute
480 x 21 work days per month = 10,080 minutes in a work month / 10,000 items = 1.008 items to check per minute
And don't forget weekends, holidays, and vacation time.
So are you going to budget two and a half people to do nothing but check to see if the item is on the shelf where it belongs? How frequently are they going to be required to take it down and verify that it hasn't been replaced with a copy? How much doe
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Very brief answer: YES.
Let's not be petty.
10K rare/unique volumes could easily exceed a billion dollars worth. If you pay 5 people 100K a year just to take care of them, you might equal the total value of those books after 2000 months of salaries.
Oh, but now I realize it's okay to spend trillions of dollars on weapons and shit like that, but we can't afford to pay 5 people decent salaries to take care of 10K very valuable and rare books. That's the harsh reality that gets in the way: we, the society, spend
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OK, pick one of the following:
Acne removal products;
Weight loss products;
Candy cane;
Thanksgiving turkeys;
And so on, and so forth.
Use 0.0001% of tax for any of those products and you would be able to hire an ARMY of librarians to manage rare books.
This is one of the reasons the world is going to shit. You are more than happy to spend money on useless crap, but cheap out on relics of our history and art.
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You forget, these are rare books. You don't want to handle them any more than you need to.
So no, you don't want to adulterate the book by sticking a barcode on it. And the collection won't be on a shelf where it will do contact deterioration - it's often in special holdings and boxes to ensure everything is climate controlled and such.
You want to inventory control all the rare and special books, but you can't handle the books because that will damage them.
It happens far more often than you think - the stuff
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Staff size (Score:2)
It's like saying that a bank can be excused for misplacing/losing some of the safe deposit boxes because there are so many of them.
But on the other hand, banks tend to have much larger staff to manage and control the security of all there safes compared to your typical understaffed/underfunded university. (Even if a prestigious place like Cambridge is likely to be slightly less understaffed/underfunded than the average, it still pales in comparison to most banks) (Because most banks tend to be in jurisdiction where they could lose their banki licence if they don't follow best security practices).
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And, as they say, shockingly poor security.
I used to browse through the old engineering books and manuals in the UMASS library (that big brick tower that gave them so much trouble), and was horrified to see not so much totally missing books, but books with page after page torn or cut out!
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This is not the first story about very valuable writings being stolen, and the fact being discovered years, if not decades later.
Indeed. Last time it was the manager that committed the 25-year, $8 million library heist [slashdot.org].
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I can't decide if it was Gitchigumee or Brahma or Inti who did it though.
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God created the Earth. Everyone knows that!
Real world, testable evidence please.
Evolution (Score:3)
Re: Evolution (Score:2)
No because the concept of private property is the evolution. Taking things because you can is naturalistic behavior.
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Evolution: It's not just for behaviors anymore. (Score:2)
Behaviors in general are an evolution, so your "taking" is as much a creation as "belonging"*.
*Animals marking territory is as much "private property".
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*Animals marking territory is as much "private property".
This is a bit of leap and if we looked at how territorial claims move for wildlife, I think we would find that this interpretation of "private property" is far more mutable than ours.
A better statements is that Animals understand a concept of "occupied". Marking territory is a way to make a claim of defense. As the other poster puts it, if you are stupid enough to lose your pocket knife, then that's your failure to "defend" your territory. Likewise the same for these missing documents. Private property actu
Thief needs to win a Darwin Award (Score:1)
See subject
Re:Why weren't these secured (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would a foreign museum be the proper place for notebooks written by someone in the UK and held in a Birtish University library?
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Why would a foreign museum be the proper place for notebooks written by someone in the UK and held in a Birtish University library?
Maybe it's reasonable under the same argument as the Elgin Marbles? The natives in Britain are clearly incapable of maintaining and funding the sophisticated state and educational institutions required to protect valuable knowledge such as Darwin's Notebooks. It makes sense for an occupying colonial force, probably coming over from Portugal or Bulgaria or any of the other more sophisticated nearby cultures, to remove these artefacts for safe keeping. Makes sense, doesn't it?
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Maybe, just maybe, because neither Darwin, nor Cambridge has anything to do with the US?
r/shitamericanssay
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They've devolved (Score:2)
Back into trees. Just to prove a point.
Were Digital Scans Made? (Score:1)
Not very surprising (Score:3)
Security in libraries is very very poor, generally speaking. Especially if the thief isn't too worried about a bit of damage.
However, these should not have been available except under strict conditions which included checking they were still there when the person left.
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Also, supervising at a museum is often a low paying position filled by long-term unemployed people (I know a couple). They may tell you not to use flash lights when taking pictures or not to get to close to art exhibits, but they are definitely not going to tackle you when you snatch that Andy Warhol and sprint for the door.
After 19 years out of the Library ... (Score:4, Funny)
No worries (Score:2)
We can always get a copy from here:
https://wiki.lspace.org/mediaw... [lspace.org]
The fee is a bunch of bananas and a pound of peanuts.
Ook?