Discovery Conference

The Discovery Conferences were held in order to be decided how the Rakis hoard would be manipulated by the scholars.

The First Discovery Conference, held on Giedi Prime, met only to establish an agenda for the planning of the investigation of the find.

The Second Discovery Conference, held on Rakis itself, spent a full two years just in deciding on procedure and a cataloging system.

At the outset the Conference agreed that some classification system was needed immediately, since the time needed for transcribing of the contents of every ridulian crystal could not even be estimated. Moreover, since the contents of some were in languages thousands of years old, specialist translators would be needed from the beginning, and they had to be trained in library procedures. It was decided that a sampling procedure would be used to get some indication of the scope of the documents. The translators therefore noted only the first portion of the first work on each crystal, and assigned to the crystal a subject identification letter.

A second far-reaching decision of the Conference was that records would be put into the hands of researchers as soon as possible, even before the complete cataloging and translation was finished. For a work of this magnitude, no single publisher possessed sufficient resources and an entirely new joint venture, the Library Confraternity, was formed in order to make materials from the Rakis site available as soon as humanly possible.