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Alma Mater up in flames

This morning around 8 I logged on to work from
home. While discussing (by phone) and jointly editing a file with a colleague,
suddenly my connection to the office was lost. In the office, 30 minutes later
(yes I live only 5 mins from work!), an internal e-mail made clear why: one of
the buildings of Twente University stood ablaze. This building accidently not
only houses my own faculty, philosophy of science, my girlfriends faculty,
applied communicational sciences, but also the university's computercentre. Our
offices are connected to the internet's backbone, you've guessed it, there.
Fortunately there are no casualties.

(pictures taken from the make shift
webpage of Twente University) From
a KM point of view this is also a disaster. Notes from PhD-students, primary
sources of their research, all the paper-based material of the courses currently
under development to fit the new Bachelor-Master structure of the faculty, all
lost. All the digital stuff is still there, back-up procedures have certainly
proven their worth today. But most of us deposit the real clues to our work and
knowledge, especially of the work currently in progress, in the stacks of paper
on our desks. So to most people who work and study in these buildings this must
be a huge setback, and in some cases might even mean startig all over again on
whatever research project was at hand. It might take some time to get back
on-line again from work. To those of you whom I have promised to send material
on last weeks conference, I ask for patience, because it is all stored on my
computer at the office.....and no connection to the outside world.

Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 20, 2002 07:45 PM)