On 23/09/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:

It's time consuming and difficult. It is very easy to screw up in scanning something like this, so all of the parts will fit except for one (i.e. if something is not scanned at exactly the same elevation or gets skewed slightly in some other way). It can be done. It's just not very easy. And it's certainly not fun. I wouldn't do it for free. In the end I suspect that most digitization of such things will be done either by countries which will try to sell access to them (i.e. ProQuest) or as not-for-profit grants (i.e. a university deciding to put its PD library online, which looks good on a yearly report even if it doesn't create any revenue). This sort of dull work is not the sort of thing that too many volunteers would be interested in doing over time, IMO. (Maybe I'm wrong! Hopefully!)

We'd try to get the best scans we could. But I suspect that if you put up the raw scans and any of it could be turned to an actual use, volunteers to do the tedious labour would turn up. I'm amazed at the tedious jobs people do for Wikimedia projects in the cause of getting information into the public domain.

See also discussion on wikimediauk-l (to which this is cc'd).

- d.