Darwin Fungus Found in Cambridge University Library

The Cambridge University Library found a sample of seaweed collected by Charles Darwin from his famous "pick up random stuff" expedition on the Beagle.  As the article states:

"'I was going through a box labelled in 1950 ‘to be sorted,' said Chief Technician Christine Bartram.
'Inside it, wrapped in a newspaper from 1828, I found fungi and seaweed collected by Charles Darwin on the Beagle Voyage in South America during 1832 and 1833."

What is more exciting, finding 190 year old plant bits or a 190 year old coupon for three farthings off a head-hole drilling?  I find this story fascinating in that when a archivist normally finds fungus in a collection, the solution is a healthy dose of Lysol, but not when it is famous person fungus.  Oh, no.  That's the good fungus.  That's the stuff we keep, yeah buddy. 

And yeah, I know that the guy kinda made a big deal in the world of fungus and evolutionary science.  Big whoop.  This is almost equivalent to finding Hemingway's pencil shavings or Madam Curie's radon sample.  An oddity and kinda cool in context, but the kind of materials that they throw out at the end of Storage Wars.

Cambridge librarian finds forgotten fungus Charles Darwin brought back on the ... - Daily Mail

Smooth and Sooth Those Page With New Scanner

The IRIScan Portable Scanner Book 2 has been released that both scans and smooths the pages of books.  While conventional scanners caused worry and grief as pages bent inward away at the spine, this new scanner uses both witchcraft and wizardry to correct the unsightly image of the bent page.

The Banned Library newsroom did not reach out with anyone even partially connected with the release of the scanner and only half skimmed the article linked below, but we can tell you it might work great.  We did, however, talk to a copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica Volume 13, 1911 edition and it had this to say:

"Personally, as a book, I welcome anyone touching me, but if I have to be digitally rendered because of my delicate, easily destroyed design, I want this scanner to do it.  I can't wait to feel the light brush against my pages, up and down, left and right, gently caressing me until... Oh, yeah, scan me, baby.  Flip me over and scan me again."

The newsroom was stunned at the scanner's capabilities and the liberated nature of a book published in such a repressed time period.

Handheld scanner smoothes pages of books - Baxter Bulletin

British Library Archives Video Game Culture

The British library has begun archiving video game websites and materials to preserve the culture of the gaming industry and its peoples.

I have heard of people archiving video games (my cousin has over 45 original Nintendo games in his garage) but I think keeping the culture might be dangerous.  Imagine researchers of the future combing through message boards and comments, the thousands of files of the word "First!"  Think of how our computer overlords will look back and hear screaming 12 year olds calling out for death to campers.  Those robots will then take that as prophesy for the how the National Parks system was destroyed and view them as historical facts. 

Just be careful what you say about the next Skyrim update, I'm just saying.

British Library starts videogame website archive project - The Independent