Source: Rocket scientists mourn end of Redstone Arsenal’s RSIC library - al.com It will reopen as a “virtual” RSIC, the Army says, with “online-only access to scientific and technical journals and ebooks, plus a repository for electronic versions of technical documents.” What will remain accessible is far from all that was stored in the three-floor library building on Redstone Arsenal, library users say. That includes books that date to 1962 and volumes written by Russian scientists as well as Americans. “This is unique knowledge that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world,” retired software developer Elaine Woodling of Huntsville said this week. I have been in this library and other than the Library of Congress, it is a rare but too often denied resource. Bob Wilson
Like emperors of old, they are getting rid of the predecessors stuff. It makes them look bad, as it's mere existence invites comparison, and the intellectual curiosity that it represents is an existential threat to their power. To say it is an oversight by a bureaucrat cutting a budget is to say the soldier who pierced Archimedes made a mistake during pillaging. Those responsible are not tarnished by their accidental mistakes while carrying out duties, but rather that the duties they carry out are in and of themselves mistaken. It is their crude priorities and their base philosophies to which they place all other matters subservient, which lead them to commit acts of such timeless stupidity. As now we look back in horror on the loss of texts from ancient times, future people will look back at our generation who was first to step into the cosmos but could not bring itself to save the stories of those who took us there, and ponder our barbarity.
