A chance meeting with Deborah Douglas, Curator, Science and Technology at the MIT Museum, brought some thoughts into sharper focus. We were chatting about preserving the heritage contained in slide collections. They are hard at work on the slides of "Doc" Edgerton, "the man who made time stand still" via the invention of numerous techniques for very high speed photography. She was pleased to hear that MTU has started on Robert Vogel's slides. Both projects are very ambitious, and are planning to have a significant web presence for the results.
Their efforts include very high resolution scans and reasonably complete documentation, pushing the costs per slide above $1 (it costs about $0.25 for a basic, commercial scan), and beyond. EXCELLENT, preserve these unique insights for future researchers who really need the best possible imagery!
As noted in an earlier post, I am hopeful about the collections of our most prominent members. I am far less hopeful (at the moment, keep reading) about the excellent collections of SIA members who may not have achieved international prominence, but have images with unique insights into particular industrial heritage sites.
My "elevator speech" "...and when one of our members passes away, the heirs look at the slides and say 'Gosh, it's just pictures of a junkyard, no need to save them' and a bit of our industrial heritage disappears."
What should the role of the SIA be in preserving this heritage? We're less than 40 years old, and don't have any permanent archival facilities. Still, can we be a catalyst/sponsor to spur preservation of these collections?
One of my all time favorite quotes is from Soul of the New Machine, where an exasperated project manager tells a team member "Not everything worth doing is worth doing well!" Even low resolution capture of historic images is better than losing them.
Again, as always, more questions than answers, stay tuned...
jay
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment