Word: acidity
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...what price out books? Many of the books printed on "acid paper" in the 19th and early 20th centuries that are housed in Widener library are decaying due to the lack of climate control in the library. According to Harvard College Librarian Nancy Cline, "We're baking those books.... We're not providing [the books] the proper level of stewardship...
...very concerned about the "acid paper problem," as Widener's current predicament is often referred to, because every book that is left to turn into dust represents a piece of lost heritage that will never be recaptured...
Suddenly, the forest corner has come alive. An unseen fan whirs on and begins to flip the pages of the book, which actually have letters printed upon them in ferric sulfate. Tea, or tannic acid, drips from the oak leaves and unites with the letters to form ink. According to Reynolds, "The wind is in effect writing itself, because the text is in onomato-poetic sounds of the wind." Thus, the figurative becomes the literal, and the metaphors that spring to mind when one first peers through the bubble windows reach a new and wonderful level...
Last week Scottish scientists may have cloned a sheep using DNA, but it was Crick and Watson who first introduced us to DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid. Crick, a Brit, was an inveterate scientific tinkerer as a boy. Watson, a Chicago native, won his degrees in zoology. In 1953 both were researchers at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, where they identified the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecular substance that makes possible the transmission of inherited characteristics. In 1976 Crick joined the Salk Institute and geared his energies toward exploring the workings of the brain, including short- and long-term...
Every library that stores materials printed on acid paper--every library at Harvard--needs climate control, which means many of them will need large scale environmental upgrades and renovations like Widener's, she says...