22 May 2012 The Universtiy of Leiden- Bibliotheek

 We are researching the history of technology and staying at Leiden we learned much about Christian H. and body parts, complementary with our reading assignment, but when we reached the university we came across  a technology, that I believe, far out strips many of the inventions we saw on display or listened about from our wonderful guides. Books. Books in general are quite important, they help us learn so we dont each have to learn what the guy before us learned and wasting essentially years of life learning by experience the exact same things as everyone else. But at the library we were allowed and able to touch a five hundred year old book. It was not yellowed or falling apart, infact it did not look its age at all. The technology used to create it was different. It was purely by chance that I listened in as a fellow student asked about the old anatomy book. Instead of being made of beaten-plants like books of today, or paypurus, or of vellenum (sp?) or animal skin this book was made up of old fabric, so very beaten-plants that went through more processes. Because of these processes there is no yellowing caused by a chemical reaction oxygen and oils do not deteriorate the anatomy book as it does our more modern book. So why do we have such books now when there were books more superiorly made earlier? Simple, money and digital libraries. Books keep updating, and are no longer required to be individually created. Yet I got to touch a five hundred year old book so I believe that so far that is the most important technology we learned about on our trip thus far. ---Alix Carpenter