Re: [ARSCLIST] N.Y. Times article on digitizing

[Michael Shoshani <mshoshani@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sam Brylawski wrote:
> The same section of the Sunday Times (Business) includes an interesting
> piece on Edison and the phonograph. Nothing especially new in it but it's
> good to see the newspaper of record debunk old myths about records.
> 

Cute puns aside :), "Newspaper of Record" doesn't mean what most people
think it does. I have a large, lengthy book that the Times published in
1951 to commemorate its centennial, and that book defines a newspaper of
record as a newspaper that prints important Presidential speeches,
political platforms, etc, in full. The book also includes other
newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, as newspapers of record.

One of the things about the NY Times article is the mention of the great
expense of digitizing archival material. This is undoubtedly true in the
case of the Library of Congress; the LC has all kinds of material
available online in full, uncompressed, large format as well as smaller
formats for actual webpage display. Heck, there's an entire online
exhibit of the work of a Tsarist Russian photographer who traversed the
Russian countryside taking color photographs using successive-frame
exposures on black and white film through filters....you can see very
nice, color-corrected reconstructions of the original color photographs
in a variety of resolutions, but you can also access the full-resolution
original uncorrected scans of the original separation negatives. Try
getting *that* from the private sector.


Michael Shoshani
Chicago