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• Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) today announced that award-winning R&B musician Gary Clark Jr. will perform live at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America , taking place in Austin, Texas, on May 5–8, 2024.
• B2B Summit North America will present the latest research, best practices, and client stories to help B2B marketing, sales, and product leaders and their teams accelerate growth through cross-functional alignment.
• “At this year’s B2B Summit North America, Gary Clark Jr. will serve as an inspiration to B2B leaders looking to unify their strategy, technology, and operations around customers.
• B2B Summit North America is known for delivering a well-rounded experience to its attendees that fosters learning, sharing, and community-building in a fun and supportive environment.

• And even if some few have somehow survived, they are moth-eaten and in a state of decay, and remembered about as well as if they had never existed.
• By making the manuscripts into a book, he would preserve the knowledge they contained – but not the manuscript, not the artefact itself.
• He does not mention how difficult his Byzantine manuscripts were to read and transcribe, even for someone familiar with the language.
• Every manuscript is its own text, its own space of knowledge, and an irreplaceable part of our shared cultural histories.

Preserving the Past

• Our knowledge of the past, and the wisdom we can gain from it, is bound in material objects – whether manuscripts, paintings, ruined buildings or clay pots – that are decaying.
• What will we preserve of the past?
• We are lucky if we can now read a text in 50 manuscripts.
• Read more:
  Uncovering the mysteries of The Book of Kells – from myopic monks on magic mushrooms to superhuman detail

• Manuscript tourism became a popular activity for wealthy scholars like Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), whose collection became the core of the British Museum’s collection.
• Of course, many of these collectors simply stole or smuggled what they wanted from struggling monasteries in what are now Greece, Sinai and Israel.
• But their work made possible the rise of printed editions of classical and medieval works.
• Our modern editions of the Bible and the Iliad, for example, do not exactly match their underlying manuscripts.

Read more:
Dogs in the middle ages: what medieval writing tells us about our ancestors’ pets

Digital decay

• Even if we prefer the edited versions, printed books decay faster than manuscripts, and take up just as much space.
• Print does not solve the problem of preservation; it only postpones it.
• In the 20th century, digital scanning tools and computer-based storage seemed to offer a new kind of solution.

• Second, digital images are often in proprietary formats, meaning that without the library’s viewing software you cannot actually examine the manuscript.
• The digital format is still chained to its digital shelves in a private space.
• Third, as a recent cyber-attack on the British Library demonstrates, the digital space seems not to be safer than the physical one.
• The digital library space, with its proprietary viewing software and its specialised file formats, is now shuttered.

Conservation and accessibility

• Yet physical conservation comes at the expense of accessibility.
• We can, however, use advances in AI and computer technology to improve approaches to digital conservation and enable wider access to the uniqueness of individual manuscripts.
• To avoid digital decay, we need to devote the same attention to digital conservation as to material conservation.

• Images of manuscripts would then have a readable text and all the unique elements of the material original – its decorations and artistry, its errors and doodles.
• In this enhanced digital form, manuscripts could come to local museums, libraries and galleries, where they would be accessible to everyday visitors as well as specialists.
• But unlike him, we can now offer the experience of the manuscript as well as the text, and to a much wider audience.

Jonathan L. Zecher receives funding from the Templeton Religion Trust.

• Today, Nikon announced the availability of the first major firmware update for the Z 8, Firmware Ver.
• Additionally, Nikon has also announced availability of the latest version of NX Tether, Nikon's free tethering software for still and video professionals.
• 2.0, a computer software application that enhances functionality for tethered shooting2 with a Nikon digital camera, available free of charge.
• (supported cameras: Z 9, Z 8)
  Supports an efficient workflow when switching between still image and video recording, and a multi-functional yet simple and easy-to-use user interface.

• RALEIGH, N.C. and VIENNA, Jan. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- PSPDFKit, a leading document processing and manipulation platform, announces the release of XtractFlow – a groundbreaking intelligent document processing (IDP) engine powered by generative AI.
• XtractFlow provides advanced automation for large-scale document classification and data extraction across a broad range of formats, with human-level accuracy.
• XtractFlow efficiently extracts data from hundreds of document formats, including PDF, JPEG, Office and CAD files, regardless of document complexity.
• For more information and to experience XtractFlow with a free trial, please visit the PSPDFKit website .