Slashdot Mirror
12 Million Historic Photos Scanned to Web
Snosty writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting that British Pathe, a cinema news service dating to the 19th century, has scanned one image for every second of their 3500 hours of 35mm film. That makes for 12 million images covering everything from the Boer War to the Beatles available on their web site!"
Here in Canada, internship salaries are partly financed by the government.
The job of scanning 1 image of every second of 3500 hours worth of footage seems like the perfect intership.
Starts out interesting...
Quickly becomes boring...
After a while you want to throw up each time you make a scan...
Half way through you actually throw up every time you scan a second...
When you're done, all that is left is an insensible blow of twitching flesh!
So, the posting of photographic archives like this are crucial to historians and historical research. It is absolutely amazing how much information can be gleaned from photographs in terms of street names, individuals, automobile license plates etc... that enable one to pull out the history from bits of information surrounding the subject in photographs. Recently, I was given access to an archive of photos from my late grandfather who was in the OSS, and I am absolutely amazed at the amount of history in these photos. There are images of the meeting with Stalin, Rosevelt and Churchill, images of partisans stringing up Musolini, images of streets and individuals that I would absolutely love to spend time investigating, perhaps even getting another Ph.D. thesis out of it.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Uhh, no, not quite accurate. I tried looking at the archive after reading this story on the BBC yesterday. It was down then, so I'm not surprised it's still down now. More a case of BBCed than slashdotted.
Give them a few days to realise that their press releases were a bit more effective than they originally anticipated and I'm sure that the site will be alright.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The Library of Congress has a long term project called "American Memory" which collects images in American history though some are copyrighted others are public domain. http://memory.loc.gov/
I took a couple of courses on film archiving and preservation back when I was a film school student, so I guess I have a couple of things to point out here.
1) One would think they want to profit from licensing the hi-res images for commercial use. I don't really know if it's okay to release important images from important early films that geeks of my kind value and cherish for commercial iconographic use just per se. I understand BP's need to be financially compensated for their trouble, but at least do it for money.
and, 2) Proper preservation must be taken in the original form. 35mm films should be transcribed to 35mm so they can be watched in original form in the future. I think nitrate must be sacrificed (even though they say it has a different glow on projeciton) and acetate used instead, but the importance of original media in film archiving is not to be understated.
This is a subject that really touches a nerve down with my deepest feelings, so, um, forgive me if I got cocky or arrogant or anything.