Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

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This is something people don't seem to realize. Some film will not survive the mechanical nature of automated scanning. The very act of unspooling the deteriorated film can destroy it. I have no experience with this specific microfilm, but have seen plenty of reels of 16mm and 35mm film just fall apart on a telecine unit. The tensions involved will rip apart weakened film stock. A good telecine operator will manually inspect film reels by winding them by hand. This was much more convenient when the film was left wound at "tails" since the operator would need to wind it back to the "head" anyways. This also allows the operator to determine if the film is warped beyond the abilities of the telecine. If it is too warped, maintaining proper focus is nigh impossible in real-time. High end scanners that are not real-time actually have a mechanism to "gently" press each frame flat to help counter this warping.

All of this to say that the digital scanning of a large archive like this with very much known deteriorating stock will not be done in any manner of "automated" way like the GP suggests.

> Some film

So run the rest through the automated scanner.

Oh wait, that isn't happening, either, because they are not the most "at risk".

I can pretty much predict where this is going. It will all be lost.

I'm sure they would be more than happy to do that as soon as the check clears that you write them to fund the project.

My proposal gets the most scanned for the least money. Doing the most brittle ones first is the least scanned for the most money.

Of course, the people that have been handling archival for hundreds of years have done zero thought about it, and they just needed you, so smart, to tell them how to do it right.

I must be smarter, because the HP paper archives burned down because the "smart" people dithered about having an expensive archivist do it.

You must be a troll or someone totally ignorant of the archiving process in the real world. From your posts, you seem to think that the entire act of archiving is the digital scanning of an image. This is just one step of the many that needs to be done. A proper archive would log which operator did the scanning so questions can be be made to the proper person. Metadata needs to be logged so that these random digital images have some sort of meaning. Otherwise, it'll look like someone's mobile photo gallery; just a pile of incrementing file names and dates of when the scan took place. Basic information on which roll would be useful. Most microfilm archives like this already have a bunch of information associated with them which is how the librarians know how to find the roll to begin with. Associating the exact same information with this new scan would be a minimum expectation. Which off the shelf software package, retail or FOSS, would you use to handle all of this? Once all of this is completed, how do you utilize the work that you have done so that it serves a purpose? What infrastructure does this require?

In your simplistic concept of drop in a new roll every time someone walks by, how is this getting accomplished?

If only they had hired the expertise of someone that posts on Hacker News all day!

Archives of precious materials are almost always insured. After all the damage from your proposed digitization, batteries of insurance company lawyers would likely be there to serve you (with papers and/or digitized copies of same) for not following best archiving practices in your rush to digitize.

It'll all burn down or flood out before they get ready to try preserving it.

Seems like you have your work cut out for you, seems more productive than posting on HN all day every day.

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