On 07/03/2008, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
That's a more positive attitude! :-*
It's too easy to get discouraged by the enormous proportions of the task. Large museums (like Pitt Rivers) are problematical because of the amount of paperwork covering the artifacts.
With museums like Pitt Rivers you just photograph everything in the display cabinets wait a few years and repeat. Need a decent low light camera mind.
Small volunteer-run museums are often in a desperate state because of a lack of resources and expertise. They often can do little except watch items rot away before their eyes. As a starting point they might be more amenable to a win-win arrangement.
We are not experts in preservation and don't have the funds to support it.
The Mormons are renowned for going to local churches and microfilming parish records. Outsiders may view their motivations as peculiar, but we cannot dismiss their contribution to record preservation.
Scanning records a separate issue and requires a different approach. Photographing something without damage is fairly easy. Scanning without damage is hard. While technically the Hasselblad H3D-39 can take photos of A2 sized objects with a resolution of about 300DPI the price tag is over $30K. The upshot of this is that we are mostly going to be limited to scanning fairly common stuff or stuff that we or friends and relatives actually own since most collections are likely to be worried about damage.