Over the course of history we have discovered many precious documents that revealed how our ancestors went about things, from science documents to history records, and they are all very precious to us. Sadly, some of them might soon become unusable due to the damage caused by the elements.
However, in India, they might soon resolve this issue, thanks to some engineers and archivists teaming up to save precious records of times long past.
Ancient civilizations had written their documents on various sorts of organic materials that tend to decay to the point where the writing cannot be read anymore. They can be eaten by insects, or faded by sunlight, or destroyed by humidity, and being exposed to temperatures that are too high or too low can speed up this process.
Usually, in developed countries, librarians and archivists skirt around this issue by identifying the most fragile texts and putting them in air-conditioned and dehumidified areas, and take them out only briefly for study or display purposes. But archivists in the developing world often find that energy is too costly to be used for these purposes, or unavailable.
Since what they are in need of is cheaper energy and a more economical solution for the container, researchers have teamed up to create a simple solar-powered device with an insulated container with a dehumidifying and a temperature-controlling mechanism. It is powered by solar cells, and batteries on rainy days.
When the conditions in the container are optimal, the device will power down and turn back on when one of the elements goes out of balance again.
"As long as the documents aren't accessed all day long, the power requirements aren't that hefty," said Harrison King-McBain, an engineering graduate student from the University of Toronto.
However, in India, they might soon resolve this issue, thanks to some engineers and archivists teaming up to save precious records of times long past.
Ancient civilizations had written their documents on various sorts of organic materials that tend to decay to the point where the writing cannot be read anymore. They can be eaten by insects, or faded by sunlight, or destroyed by humidity, and being exposed to temperatures that are too high or too low can speed up this process.
Usually, in developed countries, librarians and archivists skirt around this issue by identifying the most fragile texts and putting them in air-conditioned and dehumidified areas, and take them out only briefly for study or display purposes. But archivists in the developing world often find that energy is too costly to be used for these purposes, or unavailable.
Since what they are in need of is cheaper energy and a more economical solution for the container, researchers have teamed up to create a simple solar-powered device with an insulated container with a dehumidifying and a temperature-controlling mechanism. It is powered by solar cells, and batteries on rainy days.
When the conditions in the container are optimal, the device will power down and turn back on when one of the elements goes out of balance again.
"As long as the documents aren't accessed all day long, the power requirements aren't that hefty," said Harrison King-McBain, an engineering graduate student from the University of Toronto.
Credit: Photo Courtesy of Colin Clarke
Last September, during a trip to Kerala, India for the Eighth World Syriac Conference hosted by the St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, Colin Clarke had become aware of the scale of the conservation problem in developing countries. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, which was used widely by Christians all throughout Asia, and Clarke, the director of the Canadian Centre for Epigraphic Documents and a librarian by profession, found the time to check out the historical texts in churches and monasteries local to the area.
The libraries had palm-leaf documents, dating back hundreds of years and written in Malayalam, a Classical Indian language widely used in the area. There were also manuscripts written in Syriac. One text that Clarke is particularly excited about dates to the 13th century and may have been written by a man named Bar Hebraeus, a polymath who wrote about literature, science, philosophy, religion, history and medicine, Clarke said.
"The 13th-century manuscript may have been written by Bar Hebraeus himself," Clarke said. "Bar Hebraeus was one of the greatest thinkers of his day. This is like having a manuscript written in Aristotle's own hand. Definitely, this would be a world treasure, if the attribution is correct."
He talked to a corepiscopa (a country bishop) who was in charge of one such historical text repository and was informed that even if the repository had the equipment to control humidity and temperature, they wouldn’t be able to afford to keep the power on.
Clarke contacted King-McBain and Michael Chino, a graduate student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada to help him out as soon as he returned Canada, because he promised he would help. The “proof of concept” device was shown at the University of Toronto on Aug. 19, and the team demonstrated its possibilities.
They also found a place in Kottayam, Kerala, India where the solar units could be built. Clarke is now looking for a solar tech firm to finish development and help with the challenges in construction, and is asking anyone who might help be able to help him to contact him through the CCED website.
King-McBain have said that the device requires no fuel and very little maintenance. The design is as bare-bones as it can possibly get, most components are off-the-shelf and there are no parts that could be easily broken, which means that the device is as sturdy as possible.
While the cost was kept down to about $3,000-$5,000, this might still be difficult for the facilities in the developing countries to afford, so the CCED is trying to raise funds for a few of those devices to be constructed and installed in facilities in India, where they can serve their purpose.
The device is not yet perfect. Not all texts are made equal, and so those made of different materials will require different temperature and humidity settings for optimal conservation, and a repository will often have texts made of different materials, which means that one device may not be enough for one repository.
One way to go around this is to simply install several units with different settings in each of the facilities, but that would drive the costs up, and some repositories can’t afford even one of them for now. Another option for the engineers would be to tweak the device so that it contains different compartments, designed to separate texts which need different settings. But that would make the design more complex to execute.
"The team is working against time and cost," Clarke said. "Irreplaceable texts are in danger of being lost through environmental factors. We have the solution. Now we need the support to fix this problem," Clarke said.
Source: newszonenetwork.com
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