Palimpseste

Mundaneum – Mons

File furniture containing index cards based on the system of universal decimal classification conceived by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine (1895)

Royal Library of Belgium – Brussels

Reading room and of research of the department of the precious reserve

CERN  -  Geneva

Data center of the CERN  (European Organization for Nuclear Research)

Royal Library of Belgium – Brussels

Archives of the precious reserve.  On this shelf are parchments old of several thousands of years

Museum of Natural Sciences – Brussels

Rack in the basement

Metas – National Metrology Institute – Bern

Atomic clock with continuous fountain.  One of the most precise clocks in the world. It will lose hardly one second after 30 million years

Cinematek – Brussels

Shelf with several hard disks containing numerous movies carefully restored by the Cinematek's team.  The Cinematek  possesses one of the biggest European film stocks

Royal Library of Belgium – Brussels

3rd floor of archives

Arnano – Grenoble

Disc of synthetic sapphire which can contain about 10,000  A4 pages of documentation. This disc has a life expectancy of 3,000 years certified and is resistant to fire and even to acid

Metas – Bern

Corridor of the main building.  All the infrastructures were built to be hyper stable to avoid any vibrations in the building.

The circle on the photo is the reference point of the Earth'attraction of the building (l)

It must be recalculated every 50 cms to satisfy the required demands of precision

Arnano – Grenoble

Clean room.  Sterile place of conception of the sapphire disk

CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) – Geneva

Big room built in the sixties and converted into the data center

CERN – Geneva

The data of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), the particle accelerator, are recorded on magnetic tapes. Only 1% of the data produced by the particle accelerator are recorded and they have to be recorded again every 5 years

CERN – Geneva

Paper archives.  Only 5% of the data produced by the CERN are transcribed on paper nowadays

Royal Library of Belgium – Brussels

Books not having been moved for several years