I found this fascinating quote today:

The percentage of articles found for each journal in their studied varied greatly.  While fields such as elementary particle physics and astrophysics reported nearly 100% overlap, this finding was not generalized over other sub-disciplines in physics.  Many fields showed much less coverage, many under 5%.  Philip Davis under, The Scholarly Kitchen, Jun 2009

You should read the whole article.

Says Peter Murray-Rust

http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2096

Ay, ay Captain - let's fight!

Photo: jwyg, CC-BY-SA

http://www.tyldesley.co.uk/TyldesleyDiary.html

Update to: http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/3743341/

From EXLIBRIS-L a summary by Peter Tyldesley:

Some of you may recall that in 2007 it was reported that a British Library employee had caused extensive damage to the Tyldesley Diary, a Jacobite manuscript which I own but which was deposited with the Library for safekeeping and photographic work.

In a press release copied to this list by Christopher Edwards the BL stated that this was an isolated incident and repeatedly referred to the 1990s. One of you kindly drew my attention to the discussion taking place here and I explained why much of that press release was inaccurate.

Since then I have obtained a heavily redacted copy of the BL's own investigation report into the incident. The report reveals that in 2005 a cache of 35 items was found in a walk-in safe in a staff-only area at the BL's former premises in Bloomsbury. The safe had been concealed behind two high cabinets. It appears that 30 of the items were from the BL's own collection and 5 were privately owned, including the Tyldesley Diary.

Despite this discovery the employee concerned was able once more to gain possession of the Tyldesley Diary and it is now clear that the damage to my manuscript occurred between 2005 and 2007. At the time the employee was apprehended he had been working for an extended period in the House of Lords Record Office where he had access to many historic documents.

The employee resigned prior to a disciplinary hearing. His home was never searched. Indeed the police informed me that the BL had indicated that it was not seeking a prosecution. I asked the police nevertheless to pursue the matter. The former employee confessed to criminal damage, and received an adult caution - equivalent to a criminal conviction. He is reportedly now selling shellfish in Norfolk.

Although the Tyldesley Diary has been conserved by the BL, much of the damage proved to be irreversible. A payment has been made by the BL in respect of the loss of value, based on an independent valuation.

Throughout these events the police and the conservation team at the British Library have been supportive and professional. Based on those with whom I had direct dealings, I regret that my impressions of the management at the BL are distinctly less positive.

http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/thesis-wkp-quantanalysis (PDF)

Ortega Soto, Jos´e Felipe. M.S. in Telecommunications Engineering, Departamento de Sistemas
Telem´aticos y Computaci´on, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, M´ostoles, Madrid, 2009. Wikipedia: A
quantitative analysis.

Abstract:

Presently, the Wikipedia project lodges the largest collaborative community ever known in the
history of mankind. Due to the large number of contributors, along with the amazing popularity level
of Wikipedia in the Web, it has soon become a topic of interest for researchers of many academic
disciplines. However, in spite of the increasing significance of Wikipedia in scholar publications over
the past years, we oftenly find studies concentrating either on very specific aspects of the project, or
else, on a specific language version.
As a result, there is a need of broadening the scope of previous research works to present a more
complete picture of the Wikipedia project, its community of contributors and the evolution of this
project over time. This doctoral thesis offers a quantitative analysis of the top ten language editions
of Wikipedia, from different perspectives. The main goal has been to trace the evolution in time
of key descriptive and organizational parameters of Wikipedia and its community of authors. The
analysis is focused on logged authors (those editors who created a personal account to participate in
the project). The comparative study encompasses general evolution parameters, a detailed analysis
of the inner social structure and stratification of the Wikipedia community of logged authors, a study
of the inequality level of contributions (among authors and articles), a demographic study of the
Wikipedia community and some basic metrics to analyze the quality of Wikipedia articles and the
trustworthiness level of individual authors. This work concludes with the study of the influence of the
main findings presented in this thesis for the future sustainability of Wikipedia in the following years.
The analysis of the inequality level of contributions over time, and the evolution of additional
key features identified in this thesis, reveals an untenable trend towards progressive increase of the
effort spent by the most active authors, as time passes by. This trend may eventually cause that these
authors will reach their upper limit in the number of revisions they can perform each month, thus
starting a decreasing trend in the number of monthly revisions, and an overall recession of the content
creation and reviewing process in Wikipedia. Finally, another important contribution for the research
community is WikiXRay, the software tool we have developed to perform the statistical analyses
included in this thesis. This tool completely automates the process of retrieving the database dumps
from theWikimedia public repositories, massaging it to obtain key metrics and descriptive parameters,
and loading them in a local database, ready to be used in empirical analyses.
As far as we know, this is the first research work implementing a comparative analysis, from an
quantitative point of view, of the top ten language editions of Wikipedia, presenting complementary
results from different research perspectives. Therefore, we expect that this contribution will help
the scientific community to enhance their understanding of the rich, complex and fascinating working
mechanisms and behavioral patterns of theWikipedia project and its community of authors. Likewise,
we hope thatWikiXRay will facilitate the hard task of developing empirical analyses on any language
version of the encyclopaedia, boosting in this way the number of comparative studies like this one in
many other scientific disciplines.

".....When it comes to data storage, density and durability have always moved in opposite directions -- the greater the density the shorter the durability. For example, information carved in stone is not dense but can last thousands of years, whereas today’s silicon memory chips can hold their information for only a few decades. ....“We’ve developed a new mechanism for digital memory storage that consists of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle enclosed within the hollow of a multiwalled carbon nanotube,” said physicist Alex Zettl who led this research......"
from:
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2009, May 26). New Memory Material May Hold Data For One Billion Years. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 5, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/05/090525105418.htm