The archives building in Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city, collapsed on Tuesday afternoon.
You can read more about it on the BBC News website or on The Times Online.
Apparently, the archives held an unbroken set of minutes of all Cologne town council meetings since 1376. Unfortunately, most of the material in the archive – as in most archives, I suspect – hadn’t been copied. For the city of Cologne, this may be a disaster like the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in Dublin in 1922. That was during the Irish Civil War, whereas the archive in Cologne simply collapsed.
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