A photo archive hidden inside a limestone mine | Hacker News Reader

A photo archive hidden inside a limestone mine

atlasobscura.com

82 pointsprismatic29 comments

You can see 203,929 photos from the Bettmann collection here (not without the Getty watermark of course):

https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/bettmann-archive

It really is an extraordinary, striking collection. Bill Gates should have donated it to an appropriate museum or similar (ideally public domain as much of it as possible), instead of selling it to Visual China. A morally reprehensible choice for someone worth $75 billion to make about one of the world's most important visual archives of historical record & expression.

Apparently I can "purchase" an image of a "Mass Grave Site in Germany" filled with what I can imagine are Jewish bodies for as "little" as 150 euros, 475 euros if I want to "purchase" the large format. This is so wrong on so many levels, images like these should have been in the public domain since they were first taken, and you're completely right, it's morally reprehensible what a wealthy guy like Gates did.

Hell, I'm a collector of older photos myself, I'm orders of magnitude less wealthy than Gates but I'm pretty sure I've invested a greater percentage of my money in purchasing those old photos than Gates did, but I would never think of asking for money for people to access those old photos (I've started scanning and geo-locating some of them on this personal website [1], which is already 8-year old now, so it might not look so great but the photos do open).

[1] http://foto.maglina.ro/

The headline, and much of the story, sort of implies that the underground facility was built specifically for the photo archive.

It’s all the way at the end, but the archive is housed in the mine facility of Iron Mountain, a storage company that folks with corporate experience might be familiar with.

https://www.ironmountain.com/

And to fans of Mr. Robot, the company in the show was based off of Iron Mountain.

I think there is much to be said for storing physical media like photos and microfilm, such that the only technology you need to recover the information is a lens.

I am sure we are (and have been) losing valuable troves of early digital information, both through issues of hardware compatibility and corporate governance.

Hardware, in that the only reason I still have a CD drive at all is because I haven't replaced one old computer. Hard to read data on a CD without a CD drive.

Corporate governance, in that it seems every few months there is yet another frantic scramble by the community to back up an aging web service that has been deemed too expensive to maintain by its owner.

I expect there is a huge amount of information in this part of the digital age that in 50 years time will be gone simply because we are not actively preserving it due to a belief that it will always be there.

The problem with these analog formats is inherent generation loss, and the inability to make use of error correction codes.

While yes, that is true, there is an argument about formats as wide-spread as CD-R, DVD-R, and BD-R/BD-R-DL. Readers for these are made by many companies, and information on how to make them is wide spread. They're also just sufficiently-precise mechanics with rather trivial optics.

Does your CD drive also read DVDs? I'd guess so.

Archive team is (thankfully) doing a good job. Go support them, and the Internet Archive!

I do not hold that belief you worry about. I'd like to collaborate on that front, not actually targeting immediate accessibility like the internet archive, but rather comparably to what that mine does. Well, maybe with less focus on active, short-term retrieval, and more on just waiting until it's feasible to keep it on active HDDs.

There's an orthogonal problem: does your DVD drive read CDs? I mean, sure it does, on the abstract level of compatibility; but the _material_ of the physical data carriers degrades. Audio CDs from the 1990s are still listenable (as there's far more error correction going on in the ear of the beholder), but data CDs? Not good, and getting worse.

And that's not to mention magnetic tapes, where the charge fades even faster...

BaFe tapes don't seem to have issues with "data fading". And BD-R uses phase-change recording, which is very, very stable and not affected by fungi or other ways the dye tends to rot/degrade in CD-R/DVD-R.

Modern, high-coercitivity magnetic data tape only really has issues with hydrolysis of the binder that holds the magnetic particles to the PET film. This is prevented by very, very dry storage under about 15 degree Celsius. See e.g. this chart: https://i0.wp.com/clir.wordpress.clir.org/wp-content/uploads...

Further reading: https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/estimation_of_les/

On the other hand, the unpublished archive of Kennedy photos was stored in the basement of one of the World Trade Centers. And there was that HP archive that burned down. And the storage center for military records burned down. Etc.

Also the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

In the mountain behind my home is a similar archive, the Barbarastollen. The documents stored there on microfilm in containers contain stuff like the original building plans of the Cologne Cathedral, the Golden bull, the coronation certificate of Otto the Great, or Bach's handwritten manuscripts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_arc...

The German wikipedia page has some interesting photos:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen

Thank you for the link, that Wikipedia entry was pure engineering porn.

It's a shame that copyright works in such a way that it allows all these old and historic pictures to be sequestered away from the public long after all the original creators are gone.

'Allows'? This was somebody's life's work, sold to somebody else and so on. They can do anything they want with it.

I get it; I'd like to see some of those old photos too. But I didn't spend a lifetime collecting and collating them. So I guess I'll have to settle for what I can pay for now.

Yes, "allows." Copyright lasting as long as it does today is not a natural state of the world; it's a decision that was made by people. If we had the copyright laws today that we had at the founding of the United States, all of these photos would have long since entered the public domain. If we had the copyright laws that we had until 1976, most of them would be.

Many people, myself included, don't believe that copyright should last nearly as long as it does today.

Now, not that this has much to do with the physical collection, of course; physical property is different. But if you can obtain a copy of one of these photos, in my opinion at this point you should be able to do what you want with it.

I don't think "copyright" is the right way to think about a private collection of physical objects.

Not the physical collection itself, of course, but it definitely does apply to this part:

>When Gates moved the collection into the mine, he simultaneously erected a digital paywall, thereby securing the collection across both physical and digital space.

Or, to rephrase, he created digital copies and made them available, requiring a fee for the service. (Just as bertmann had required fees).

This instance is more an argument in favor of long copyrights than against them, because without copyright, there would have been no bertmann archive to begin with, and without the long copyright, it wouldn't have been preserved and digitized. (See the sorry state of early Hollywood film archives).

That said, I absolutely agree that our current copyright regime is horribly excessive, both in duration and in the hugely abused anti-circumvention provisions.

This is not related to copyright.

The physical images are "sequestered", and access to and control of physical items is governed by traditional property rights.

The oldest photographic archive of France, started in 1851, is hosted in a fort built after the 1870 war to protect Paris. This photographic archive was built to picture the monuments of France to protect them.

27 pictures of the site (including plans) to see here: https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/search/mosaic?base=%5B%22Pho... Those pictures are themselves stored on that site.

One can visit the site when it opens for the Journées Européennes du Patrimoine when such places with historical values are open to the public. Well, probably not this year :(

Some of the photographs of this database are available online: https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/search/mosaic?base=%5B%22Pho...

Another nearby fort (Fort de Bois d'Arcy) built for the same protection of Paris is storing the archives of films, including some of the oldest movies in the world (films by Lumière brothers).

http://www.cnc-aff.fr/internet_cnc/Home.aspx?Menu=MNU_ACCUEI...

There is a similar storage facility in a mountain east of Salt Lake City where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints keeps geneological and church records.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Mountain_%28Salt_Lake_...

This is very similar to what the GitHub Archive is doing https://archiveprogram.github.com/

> The snapshot will include every repo with any commits between the announcement at GitHub Universe on November 13th and 02/02/2020, every repo with at least 1 star and any commits from the year before the snapshot (02/03/2019 - 02/02/2020), and every repo with at least 250 stars.

Looks like a good practice to have your own public projects archived forever in the arctic is to star them yourself.

This started as Bill Gates' personal hobby business.

Illegal cookie wall. Can't read the content. :(

"Can't" or "won't"? FWIW, I never even saw the cookie wall, but I use uBlock Origin.

Brave browser on iOS here. I also never saw it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com