[pbhjpbhj]

How much of it is going to be wasted like this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12575029

Why use tax payers money to buy prints of Turings papers when the original papers weren't lost and the content of the prints was known? Makes no sense to me. Just so you can stick some pieces of paper in a glass case somewhere?

[ig1]

They were papers owned by Turing with his handwritten notes on them.

[pbhjpbhj]

As I understand it they were mainly offprints (reprints of articles that were bound in the original print run) sent to Prof Newman when Turing was published. It's possible Turing owned them but not in any significant way. Newman kept the papers. Then he tried to flog them for £½ million at Christies, couldn't, but somehow he or his supporters managed to convince the NHMF to give £200,000 GBP (along with £30k (?) or so funds raised elsewhere) for the papers.

It appears from all reports I've seen that there is literally nothing of significance that would be lost with the export of these papers. None of the Press, which all seems to be based on the writing of Gareth Halfacre, detailed what was special about the papers:

"The set includes articles which have been annotated by Newman, along with Max Newman's name inscribed in pencil in Turing's hand. Accompanying the set of offprints is the Newman household visitors’ book with several signatures of Turing, that of Turing’s mother and, of special significance to Bletchley Park, signatures of other wartime codebreaking giants." [from http://www.nhmf.org.uk/LatestNews/Pages/EleventhHourRescueof...]

It seems the public were sold a lie. People thought the papers were Turings original notes and such when in fact he just wrote his friends name on the top.

The NHMF should now just take hi-res scans of the documents and sell them for whatever they can get. Nothing of significance will be lost you can look up the papers on Google Scholar.

Edit: as an associated example, you can get http://plms.oxfordjournals.org/content/s2-42/1/230.extract for free but it costs you $22k for the first edition print (http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?from=sea...). IMO the free online version is more valuable.