> On Jun 15, 2017, at 11:38 AM, Rod Smallwood via cctalk
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 15/06/2017 16:19, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
>> There are no plans or budget to scan this material en mass, so it wouldn't
>> make
>> sense for anyone to come here assuming they would be allowed to do that.
>>
>> If you look at the actual museum policy on copying material in the
>> collection,
>> it is done on demand by staff at 50 cents per page.
>>
>>
>> On 6/14/17 11:59 PM, emanuel stiebler wrote:
>>
>>> But seriously, does it make sense to got there for few days, and support
>>> somebody in scanning the material?
>>>
>>> I understand, that in few days we can't scan all, but it is a start?
>>>
> Oh Dear Al what are you doing!
>
> That is a really negative statement. You are protecting nothing.
That seems like an unfair statement. I don't see anything in what Al says (or
has said in the past) that justifies accusing him of "protecting". It makes
perfect sense that a museum with just a handful of employees and a very limited
budget would not plan to scan 1200 feet of boxes holding hundreds of thousands
of pages of stuff. Just doing the inventory that exists must have been a large
effort, and indeed we are told that they relied on specific funding to get that
much.
If you think that it's possible to get funding to acquire equipment and hire
people sufficient to scan that large body of material in a reasonable amount of
time, I'd encourage you to make the effort to raise that money. But to pretend
that it could be done on the existing budget seems unreasonable to me.
Actually, if more funds are to be thrown at this collection, my recommendation
would be first to fund a more detailed inventory of the documents, so that it
would be possible to point out which parts of which box are worth the
additional effort of scanning. Even that is likely to be a large effort, since
presumably we're talking about tens of thousands of documents, and even if it
takes only a handful of minutes to identify and record what each document is,
that could easily add up to a manyear or two. Does anyone here have a spare
$100k lying around?
paul
