geni wrote:
2009/7/18 Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com:
Put me in touch with instructors at art schools and I'll incorporate restoration into their curriculum. You'll be surprised how scaleable this is, particularly if we work out exhibition opportunities.
-Durova
Restoration isn't the problem for the most part. The English part of the National Monuments Record contains about 10 million items (mostly photos I think). Wales and Scotland ad few million more.
That includes a fairly complete public domain aerial survey of the UK from the 1940s.
We do not have the capacity to support digitalization on that scale.
Well, who's your "we"?
In the case of the NPG, it is quite clear that the cost of the digitalization is small compared with the potential benefit. There are people and organisations willing to pay to have a copy of these famous portraits. The issue is how to collect the funds without puting a copyright on the images. For this, we need a new business model. Think about how donations was raised to free up Blender.[1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History
Yann