Digitally Archiving Historical Sites?

Black_Macrame asks: "I have recently moved from 10 years of working with the net in various capacities (read all) to a slightly more analog field. I am now the curator of a Historical Site in Texas which is essentially, a relatively isolated, old (1875) family home. It once was a school, and is now currently a tax shelter for the family, and a fertile wildlife sanctuary. No-one has opened many of the drawers of the furniture here since they were last shut. There are letters of love, war, death, and all the usual human experiences, plus alot of antiques and many old books. It's a big historical database and I want to archive -everything- digitally: letters, furniture, books, 360 VRML of the rooms and even old 78 rpm records. Does anyone out there have any experience with similar projects? Any suggestions for tracking the antiques (books, furniture, knick-knacks) online? Suggestions for archiving the 78's? Anything in general?"

Comments

Great Project and some advice

[sien]

The project sounds interesting. I'd email the big museums around the world to see what they have to say on the issue.

I have had some experience with people scanning in 3D objects. It's really fiddly and error prone but no impossible. The hardware all sucks but it's usable. Trackers all drift and behave according to their own rules. Smaller objects ( i.e. 20cm cubed or less ) can be more easily scanned with 3D scanners, but these are hideously expensive. You might want to contract out a company for the smaller stuff, you can find them easily enough with Google.

For the room and building scans DONT use VRML. Get an someone who can handle a 3D CAD package to build the thing with textures from photographs. Quicktime VR is neat, but not enough probably.

If there is a University nearby check if they have courses for people doing architecture and 3D graphics. If they do you could give some students some very valuable experience and get cheaper labour for yourself.

Xerox

[Unknown Poltroon]

Xerox it all first(documents at least) and make 2 copies of each. Put one somewhere safe, put the originals somewhere else, and then work from the xerox copies. That way you dont have to worry about damaging the originals, and if the place burns down, you have copies offsite.