One of the most prolific logicians in history is Professor Saharon Shelah of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has authored or co-authored 753 research articles and 5 research monographs. Almost all of these works are of very fundamental nature, they answer well-known problems and open new directions of research. It is typical for Shelah's papers that they are long and very condensed as far as the form/exposition is concerned. Also they range over wide spectrum of mathematical topics: from set theory, to model theory to group theory to measure theory, real analysis and theoretical computer science. Many specialists compare Shelah to mathematical giants like Leonhard Euler or Paul Erdos. Naturally, Shelah has been awarded many prestigious awards. On November 4th, Shelah was awarded the Janos Bolyai Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. (Former awardees of the prize were Henri Poincare and David Hilbert.)
One of Shelah's co-workers and friends estimates that he produces some 100 pages of handwritten notes weekly. Then, at least some of these notes go to a typist in Rutgers University who typesets them in TEX. Also, Shelah has a very specific way of working: he constantly revises and improves his own results, and very often he re-writes and/or corrects papers that were already published! Add to this the fact that large part of his work is done in cooperation with other mathematicians throughout the world (he has more than 175 co-authors!) and you may imagine the weekly flow of mathematical articles in (various) forms of TEX.
To make the works of Shelah available to the mathematical community a special Web site was created: Shelah's Archive . However, for the reasons explained above, the content of the site is constantly changing, with papers being added, other papers being revised etc.
All this means that the stream of Shelah's papers has to be processed somewhere. Now, where could this somewhere be? Yes, it is in our Department. Every single byte of Shelah's work is kept and processed on a Linux running PC in our Department. Only after all processing, cleaning and decision making is done some of the files are transferred to the Rutgers University, the official place of Shelah's Archive.
Of course, processing files here and ``Web-publishing'' them at Rutgers is somewhat inconvenient. This is why it has been suggested to make Shelah's Archive a totally UNO-based enterprise. At the moment the idea is being studied and, who knows, perhaps soon there will be many logicians regularly (virtually) visiting our library?
Imp O. Ster