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The New York Times Digitizes Millions of Photos Going Back To 19th Century (betanews.com)
The New York Times is digitizing millions of historical photos dating back to 1896. From a report: The NYT has a massive collection of photos dating back decades, and the plan is to digitize millions of images -- some dating back to the late nineteenth century -- to ensure they can be accessed by generations to come. The digitization process will also prove useful for journalists who will be able to delve into the archives far more easily in future. Until now, historic news articles and photos have been stored on microfilm and in other physical forms. This is not only difficult to catalog and navigate, but also prone to deterioration over time and through use. The newspaper is using Google Cloud for the digitization.
This will come in handy for catching time-travelers and immortals.
> The newspaper is using Google Cloud for the digitization.
But what I would like to know is what brand of hard drive the images are stored on. Also the favorite coffee brand of the main developer.
Who on earth is interested in what cloud provider they used except for Google's marketing department?
Well, one side affect of digitization and DRM is the ability to change history. The Orwellian memory hole described in 1984 has been made real. Need to change sleeping beauty to make it 2018 PC compliant... no problem. When the DVDs and VHS tapes eventually wear out, the only version that will legally exist will be the "remastered" edition where the princess wakes up of her own accord just because.
how many of the images are considered to be in public domain?
Just because you digitize something doesn't mean you own the rights to the image.
Sounds like a combination of cash grab and physical space savings.
Hope they're using a lossless/high res algorithm to preserve the images.
Which is, uh, great to know, But is there any information about whether and where we can see the collection? Or how they've decided to actually do the archival photographs/scans or whatever it is?
If their algorithms don't like the images, they're likely to lock the NYT out or delete the contents of the drive.
I'm not sure there are any vendors out there I'd trust. I'd suggest buying a large number of commodity drives (they don't have to be perfect) and place them in groups of six to make a RAID 6 drive. It's not that expensive, especially compared to rebuilding the archive if/when things go wrong.
If this is a do-once sort of thing, once it's done it's done and if it crashes it is lost forever, then the financial industry often uses mirrored RAID 6. It's not impossible for that to die, but it's very, very unlikely.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Which is, uh, great to know, But is there any information about whether and where we can see the collection?
The article didn't say anything at all about making the collection available to the public.
It only said that they were digitizing it. They may be doing this for their own use.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
How does it feel being so woke, and knowing there is nothing you can do to stop us?
Most towns have historical societies, many of which have boxes full of fading photographs. Digitizing those photos is something they should be doing. As a bonus, a lot of fading can be undone with free software.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Not really backed up unless they are stored in 3 places on different continents.
One in North America, One in Europe and one in Oceania possibly New Zealand.
If it ain't film it ain't real
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just for once I'd like to see a technical discussion on Slashdot that doesn't immediately become a cesspit for the insane asylum of US politics.
After all, given the NYT's ownership, who wouldn't be surprised by a bit of digital historical revisionism?