On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: I should have listed more options! Burning is striking as such a symbolic action: You're not just putting them in the trash, or in a recycle bin, you're destroying them at a chemical level so that they can never be reused or reclaimed. Probably won't even generate any electricity from the situation. A better option (in my estimation) would be to put up a website or some kind of notice: "These papers must go! Pay shipping and we'll send them anywhere. Come by with a truck and we'll give you all you can carry. Within a reasonable time limit, we will do anything to save these papers that isn't a drain on our time or budget". This is different from us finding out through a mailing list that the papers are on their way to the fires. I would say that it's hard to care about something you don't know about. I didn't know that this collection of papers even existed until the email telling us about the fire solution. You are right though, knowing that a historical resource exists somewhere is not nearly so positive as knowing that it won't exist anymore is a negative. I personally am driven by the motivation that the people who might care about it the most aren't even born yet, my children who won't have access to these papers, no matter how much my generation has ignored them. Preserving for future generations is a cause that only needs to be taken up for things which are not being well-preserved (or not being preserved any longer). Unfortunately, since I don't have a big fat checkbook, or any close contacts who do, it's a moot point. Money is the driver of all things, and if Money wills it, the papers will end up in the fire. --Andrew Whitworth --Andrew Whitworth

On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 06:30 +0200, John at Darkstar wrote: "We are storing these resources so we can deny people access to it in the future..." -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

Y aurait-il, selon vous, un moyen d'estimer le cout de numérisation d'une telle collection ?

2008/10/2 Christophe Henner <christophe.henner(a)gmail.com>om>: The Colorado State Library gives a rough estimate of $1.25 per page plus overheads (overall indexing, etc) http://www.oclc.org/news/events/presentations/2006/microfilm_june2006.ppt A South Dakota project likewise suggests ~$2 http://library.sd.gov/sdnewspaperdigitization/history.htm Estimates are a bit fuzzy, because most digitisation is not done direct from newspapers (which are bulky and not routinely scanned) but from microfilm, which there's a much better-understood workflow to handle and which imposes a lot less physical overhead. An Irish study gives the neat - but high! - estimate that to digitise two years worth of a single newspaper title would take about one year and ten staff at a cost of ~300,000 EUR, of which 10% would be capital investment. I suspect with software automation this could be heavily reduced. www.askaboutireland.ie/resources/OCR_DigitisationAndTranscriptionOfNewspape… Cornell quote $5-10,000 for a single year of a daily newspaper (albeit one that only printed during academic terms, so say $10-15,000 for a "real" daily) http://newspapers.library.cornell.edu/costs.html On a more upbeat note, doing the research for this I found reference to a pan-Scandinavian newspaper digitisation program called "Tiden" - "...a collaborative project of the Helsinki University Library, the National Library of Sweden, Statsbiblioteket - the Danish State and University Library in Aarhus, and the National Library of Norway for the digitisation of newspapers on microfilm" - but I can't easily find any more details on it, and the website given has vanished. I suspect this may be the project that means no-one wants to digitise this particular collection... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

2008/10/2 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>: I suspect on the order of $1-2 a page - the same as the US scans are getting - with the conversion and OCR run as a batch job on the whole set. Goodness only knows who's doing the indexing... This is outsourcing, anyway - the Irish one seems to be an entirely in-house project, which would presumably explain the high costs. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

do you think in a direction of putting a dedicated point on this years fundraiser page and give a dedicated accoiunt + contact person for this? On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Christophe Henner < christophe.henner(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: