The library at Coimbra is well worth a visit, I didn't even know about the bats!

Coimbra in general is worth a visit. :-) And so is the surrounding countryside and towns.

My oldest kid pointed out that the university literally has an ivory tower on a hill :-)

As a library worker myself, I keep noticing and continue to find HN's fascination with libraries interesting. What do you think that's about?

>What do you think that's about?

I think as a group of mostly full time technologists, we tend to take solace in the quaint comforts of the old analog world, and appreciate it a bit more than most. After spending 12 hours staring at a screen and lost in a completely abstracted world, I (and I suspect other developers) enjoy things like reading paper books, baking, fishing, anything that exists solely in tangible reality.

I suspect it has to do with the vast amount of worlds which exist inside the 1000s and 1000s of books. Take that fascination and mix it with our (many who read hn) fascination on how to store, quickly receive, and organize knowledge in better ways–everything from speed to aesthetics.

The people who do work a lot with massive amounts of data may mask what we do in a dry and sterile language, but I’ve noticed that most people who do this have a deeper secret love of knowledge and libraries and wisdom.

HNers very much like knowledge, and books contain large amounts of it.

Public libraries are amazing. The state gathers, keeps and maintains all the written knowledge it is able to and then distributes it (mostly) free of charge to the population.

For me librarians have been the keepers of our heritage and knowledge since ... they started doing it. We have no idea about anything before librarians (or the equivalent predecessor concept) started doing what they do.

My greatest aspiration is to contribute to our survival, culture and all.

So in the same way as anyone who makes a gritty youtube video can claim to be 'anonymous' I can claim to be a 'librarian', the least secret secret order.

Perhaps as a library worker, you are more prone to notice articles on HN that have anything to do with libraries.

Librarians are the original data scientists.

In tech, so much of what we do is ephemeral. We spend all day using frameworks that will be forgotten in a decade to write code that will be deleted in a year used by users who will have moved on to other things before then.

We crave permanence and libraries embody that.

they were organazing lots and lots of "data" long before computers even existed

It makes a pleasing change from our usual HN party animal's fascination with cocaine, MMA and casual sex, is why.

Some of the libraries featured here inspired JK Rowling for Hogwarts. You can kind of see the resemblance. Especially when you see the college students wear black robes :)

This was interesting enough that I subscribed to Smithsonian Magazine. Thanks for the recommendation!

In a large library bats are probably quite harmless but they can and do occasionally transmit rabies:

"Bats are responsible for roughly 7 in 10 rabies deaths among people who are infected with the rabies virus in the United States, [..]"

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p0611-bats-rabies.ht...

Rabies is officially erradicated in Portugal since the 1960's. I've searched for official data at: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data?s=rabies

Most cases (we're talking 0-3 in a given year) in Europe seem to be imported from tourists or immigrants returning after being bit by a wild animal. This was the case in 2011 in Portugal after a dog bite in Guinea-Bissau (article in portuguese): https://www.publico.pt/2012/03/31/jornal/portugal-registou-c...

So looking at the data, it seems the little bats have been harmless for at least 60 years.

Rabies is very rare in Europe nowadays.

That's because the main vector was the fox. The vaccination campaign that was started in the 1980s was extremely successful.

Oooh, I did not know this and love to read more about it! Do you have a good source/expository article?

Here's a pretty thorough report from the European Union: https://ec.europa.eu/food/sites/food/files/safety/docs/sci-c...

The NY Times had something about the first trials in Switzerland: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/08/us/use-of-a-live-vaccine-...

These are great, thanks!

You wouldn’t have to worry about rabies too much in a stable population like that. If they’re living their lives inside the library, the only risk would be if a human with rabies entered the library and was bitten by a bat; a very low probability event.

From my understanding the bats only enter the library at night, hunt and leave.

The article says they make their home behind the book shelves of the library, and come out at night.

Thanks, my bad, I read the article but for some reason my mind created the wrong image.