The World's Most Ancient App

According to the Wall Street Journal, The British Library released an iOS and Android app “featuring over 100 of the library’s most significant items.” Now, not only do you not need to go to a library to study the archives, but you don’t even need to go to a computer! Once subway systems get their wireless on, we’ll all be doing our textual analyses of Da Vinci’s notebooks on our way to work. Or maybe we’ll just stick with The Da Vinci Code. From the article:

As well as high-resolution images, the app provides expert commentary on many of the items and users can watch, for example, linguist David Crystal discussing the 1,000 year old poem Beowulf.

Key historical documents include 2000-year-old Oracle Bones from China and an original Magna Carta of 1215. The section devoted to music includes manuscript scores from some of the best-known classical composers, such as Handel, Purcell, Mozart and Schubert, alongside hand-written lyrics by The Beatles.