Grepstad told state broadcaster NRK that they have tried variations on family names connected to Aasen and the man who assembled material for the database, Reidar Djupedal, without coming any nearer to a solution.
Finally the institute decided to appeal to the Internet community, put the catalog files out on its web site and invited computer experts to have a crack. Not surprisingly, they were swamped with replies, their website receiving as much traffic in a day as it tends to get in a year.
Center librarian Kirsti Langstoeyl said they received more than 100 e-mails and phone calls with helpful suggestions.
"A local computing expert is now working on the case, and he is trying to trace the origins of the database by contacting former colleagues of the database creator. He has also got copies of the e-mails to get ideas of how to open the data files," Langstoeyl said.
The inaccessible catalog contains a database of information about a collection of 11,000 titles assembled by Reidar Djupedal, who was researching the creator of "New Norwegian," Ivar Aasen. Djupedal's family donated his collection to the Ivar Aasen Center in 1994. The complete collection contains about 14,000 books and periodicals pertaining to the science of language and other cultural topics, mainly in the Scandinavian languages.
A printed list was made of the entries catalogued and archived, but it was not done alphabetically. Recreating the work contained in the encrypted database would take about four years.
The Ivar Aasen Center is a member of BIBSYS, which is a library data center offering services to all Norwegian University Libraries, the National Library, all college libraries, and a number of research libraries.
"Our hope is that the database can be opened and that the data can be imported into the BIBSYS database. This means that each title is connected to an already existing bibliographic record and that barcodes for each item easily can be produced," Langstoeyl said.
The story has received widespread international attention in the scientific and tech media. According to WIRED magazine's web site the case has given hackers pause to reflect on what might happen to their own work if they were to die suddenly.
One software solution is "Dead Man's Switch," a program that can carry out a series of tasks - notifying family and friends, sending messages, deleting sensitive data - if not reset on schedule.
