How Two Thieves Stole Thousands of Prints from University Libraries | Hacker News Reader

How Two Thieves Stole Thousands of Prints from University Libraries

atlasobscura.com

63 pointsapollinaire10 comments

This interesting story reinforces the need to scan and publish these images online. Keeping them locked up in dusty libraries denies the world the beauty created by talented artists and printers.

From what I understand, the issue is that labor is limited compared with the sheer volume of material to be digitized.

I wonder if any such libraries have considered programs for volunteers to come in and digitize some materials. Would it be worth it for them to do some sort of minimal training for people to learn to handle materials correctly, run a scanner, and do data input? It's the sort of thing that I think I would find enjoyable and meaningful to do as a weekend activity.

Yep, you said it. The issue isn't actually scanning labor exactly. I was a sysadmin for a mid-sized academic library's digital archives. We had 11 students working 10-20 hours a week (less during exams, more during break). The burden wasn't the money paying the students, it was the digitization tech (painting and large prints need plotter sized scanners + in general dealing with very old stuff is problematic because of heat and light damage). Books use sheet feed scanners if you're willing to debind them or flat bed scanners if you aren't. Video digitization is a shit shoot because of the number of formats and mechanical failures in hardware. We were just buying any spare machine we could off eBay and local TV stations because no one could repair stuff.

And even when you have the content digitized, hardware costs for arrival and ingestion, and librarian time for the metadata citation are also limiting factors.

The software most libraries use to present digital archives, CONTENTdm, is supremely bad as well so there is some understandable trepidation about having content scale faster than the interface to serve it does. I don't know if I signed an NDA but there were some truly bad architectural decisions for scaling, and at the time the back end was this repulsive binary flat file format. We often had issues with failed writes breaking whole collections.

Storage is also a huge premium. If people are going to scan this stuff, they're going to be saving at ultra-high resolution JPEG2000 or TIFF, not just web resolution JPGs. At least this side of the equation has gotten easier over time as storage gets cheaper.

I had a lot of fun in the job (enterprise storage + this being around the same time that H264 took off) but I did get the sense that the level of investment required to make progress was prohibitively more than what was available.

This would seem to me to be a great case for a large foundation offering a digitization and open access grant specifically to scale and cover a project.

Reminds me of a recent podcast from this American Life called "the feather heist". Where a kid stole rare bird corpses from a museum to use the feathers for fishing bait flies

Is there a happy ending? What happened to the unreturned prints? And did the unpunished thieves end up stealing more stuff without getting caught again?

Yeah definitely felt half finished. Where are they now?

Edit: here's a more complete version of the story: https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/662854

TLDR -- FBI got interested; charged in federal court, sentenced to 5 years.

I'm glad he got something for this...longer would have been nice though

> Green was not prosecuted in Illinois at all, and neither man was prosecuted by any other state, including Texas, where they did the most damage.

Am I missing something, or just stupid? They had the thieves and the loot, yet didn't prosecute them. And then the article ends without explaining why, like it's self-evident.

Sounds similar to what happened just recently at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh's rare books collection: http://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2018/07/20/Two...

Sounds like a case for Bookhunter:

http://www.shigabooks.com/bookhunter.php

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