In 1886, the US commissioned watercolor paintings of every known fruit (2019) | Hacker News Reader

In 1886, the US commissioned watercolor paintings of every known fruit (2019)

openculture.com

633 pointsperihelions150 comments

Tangentially related but about a year ago I trained a StyleGAN on this dataset. The results did an interesting job mapping out the transition from apples to stone fruit: http://www.highdimensionalcoconuts.com/Work/GenerativeImages...

Very cool

What's wild about this, is that there are probably a huge number of fruits that were not even discovered yet at this time. For example, this fruit discovered in 2016 https://blog.pensoft.net/2016/02/12/new-species-with-heart-s...

> Just in time for Valentine’s Day, botanists from Hawai’i have discovered a new species of plant with small heart-shaped fruits. The new species is a member of the coffee family (Rubiaceae) and part of the genus Coprosma, which occurs across many remote islands of the Pacific Ocean. They named the new Hawaiian species after the symbol of love – calling it Coprosma cordicarpa – meaning the Coprosma with heart-shaped fruit.

This would make a fantastic children's book/"kidcyclopedia" for teaching kids the fruits and vegetables

I take a similar approach in this children's book: https://github.com/ralienpp/book-two. In the end there is a section about the trees* that grow in the area, their leaves and fruits - so kids can learn to identify them. I'll incorporate some of these materials in the next iterations of the book.

The first link in the repo readme is for the on-screen PDF, you can look at the pictures.

* One of the characters in the story uses trees to figure out where they are and find their way back home.

It would be cool if there was like an interactive and facillitated way to filter all the stuff for that which is local and that they can seek out, like Pokemon Go or whatever

Maybe not. Would be confusing for the children.

After taking a quick look, many of this fruit varieties don't exist anymore. Other were renamed and other paintings reflect fruit diseases, not the fruit itself. Botanical art is valuable art, but this work does not reflect the present.

Why is ur sense of childlike wonder so ant-sized?

Maybe it could focus on what's still around but there's a section later on where they deal with older or non-existent stuff.

How disappointing; an entire article about a new fruit but not a word about whether it's edible or what it tastes like.

Figuring that out in a safe way is likely not easy.

In survival conditions, the process is messy, painful and dangerous. If you don't have a strong need, I'd think you'd happily wait for the next person to figure it out.

I forget where i read it, whether book or anecdotal, i wanna say there are general rules for testing these

I think first you're supposed to rub the leaves on your skin and see if a rash or reaction occurs. If not you proceed to lick or chew the leaf/stem, spit it out, then await a any reactions...

This continues to consuming a small piece, then the fruit, ... Etc.

Again just what i remember hearing before

Which, for certain mushrooms, would lead to concluding that you can enjoy a plate of the tasty speciments. After which your DNA will be ripped to pieces over the course of a week, followed shortly by death from general organ failure.

Wow that's insane. Any examples in particular? I knew about some plant seeds that if eaten raw have toxins like canavanine that cause malformed proteins but wouldn't be obvious at first or (afaik) if you still overwhelmingly had enough protein in your diet... but getting your DNA completely shredded like that from a source other than radiation sounds so intense.

Destroying Angel and similar mushroom's have a toxin in it which kills some kind of rna enzyme needed for cell's to function properly. Not sure if it exactly fits the bill of DNA shredding but it'll give you irreversible organ failure in a matter of hours

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

Yeah, I think this kind of procedure is basically for "you're stuck in the wild, and if you don't find something to eat soonish, you're dead anyway".

So it's inherently risky, not sure there _is_ a non-risky way out. But you definitely wouldn't want to do this without need.

This happened on Naked and Afraid where some guy found chicken mushrooms but didn’t boil them before eating them and almost died of liver failure.

Not mesmerizing, probably. Coprosma is a Rubiaceae, the most famous member of the family by a mile is the coffee. I would assume mildly sweet without any particular taste

Coprosma shrubs (of a different species) can be bought in any decent plant nursery from warm and temperate areas, the plant is hard, easy to care and famous by the lacquered appearance of its small leaves.

This "heart shaped" fruits will be tiny in any case IMAO

torrent:

https://archive.org/download/usda-pomological-watercolor-col...

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:2f3f472d24980c11d82cb236f04d1f74138e45c4&dn=usda-pomological-watercolor-collection&tr=http%3a%2f%2fbt1.archive.org%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=http%3a%2f%2fbt2.archive.org%3a6969%2fannounce&ws=http%3a%2f%2fia801808.us.archive.org%2f11%2fitems%2f&ws=https%3a%2f%2fia601808.us.archive.org%2f11%2fitems%2f

thank you - i was looking for that :)

Thanks! Is it possible to include the metadata in the images? So we can know the artist's name, the title of the piece and the subject, e.g. strawberries? It seems to be available on the site when you click one on the images.

One of the files is usda-pomological-watercolor-collection_meta.sqlite (16M). Hopefully the metadata is all there.

Also, curses upon whomever created a 100G torrent that is half padding files.

The SQLite file only contains some archive.org metadata (size, timestamp, etc.).

I merged all metadata I could gather here: https://github.com/Wumms/pomological

This reminds me of John James Audubon and his seminal work, "The Birds of America."

Audubon dedicated much of his life trying to paint every American bird. He basically crowdfunded the work by getting people to pay in advance for bird prints.

"The Birds of America" is a book of 435 images, portraits of every bird then known in the United States – painted and reproduced in the size of life, with original copies being incredibly valuable collectors' items.

If you want to go down a rabbithole read up on his biography.

I once (very very slightly) tore a page of one of the original copies. I’ve never seen a librarian be so speechless. The good news is my class was just learning about restoring paper and you can’t tell it ever happened. The few seconds after it happened were some of the scariest in my life though.

How did you fix it?

It's not hard to repair these sorts of things with a little glue.

There's this cool product called invisible tape, colloquially "scotch tape" but really that's a brand name. Get it all lined up just right and nobody will know the difference!

That’s… almost literally the worst tape product you could use (outside of obviously awful ideas like Duct Tape).

In fact repairing use of scotch tape has its own whole section in most treatises on document restoration

I am legitimately surprised that many people did not realize I was making a joke. I mean, priceless artifact, repaired with literally the thing people use as a metaphor for a "flimsy fix"

Just don’t. It’s a sure way to ruin any book.

I've seen this done to badly deteriorated paper with japanese tissue tape, eg https://www.preservationequipment.com/Catalogue/Conservation... and it did a pretty incredible job. There's a video on the left of that page that shows the process, worth a look.

HN has some of the best little anecdotes.

> I’ve never seen a librarian be so speechless.

Before pointing and screaming ala Donald Sutherland in Bodysnatchers '78, I assume?

I’ve never seen a librarian be so speechless.

It comes with the job.

Neither here nor there, but I just read an article today about how a bunch of birds are being renamed, because of 'harmful' views by Audobon et al

https://apnews.com/article/bird-renaming-american-ornitholog...

John Audubon was a slaver outside of his contributions to birding. That's why all the "Audubon Societies" are changing their names. The rest of the birds are birds named after people and the general decree is to rename all birds named after people and never name things after people again. They'll all have descriptive names now.

Neither here nor there, but my alma mater (TCNJ) renamed a building a few years ago - from "Loser Hall" to "Trenton Hall". Paul Loser was the superintendent of the Trenton school system in the early 20th century, and he was in support of segregation of black people into separate school systems. So, a reasonable renaming I think. But renaming it Trenton is itself problematic - Trenton is named after William Trent, a merchant who became one of the richest men in Philadelphia by trading, among other things, literal boatloads of slaves, which seems strictly worse than believing "merely" in segregation.

I think the most silly version is that King County in Washington, named after a pro slavery vice president, was renamed… to King County, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.

That's the least silly - it cost nothing in confusion and chaos, they slowly replaced the branding, and (almost, unless you really, really hate philanderers) everyone agrees the new subject was a great man.

Right, it’s a low-effort cop out without any actual hard work.

Wait until you hear about Judge Perez Drive in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana.

In a nearby city, we had a 'Dead Indian Highway'. It was eventually renamed to 'Dead Indian Memorial Highway'.

> That's why all the "Audubon Societies" are changing their names.

According to the article, the National Audubon Society is keeping their name, which I think is probably for the best.

Renaming birds named after people is a good idea too, but it's nice to be able acknowledge that people can do amazing things that deserve recognition while also doing terrible things that deserve to be condemned. The blanket painting of people as either heroes or villains is childish and doesn't reflect reality or the complex nature of what it is to be human.

Renaming the National Audubon Society would make about as much sense as renaming the Washington Monument. A history of slavery is something that has tainted the pasts of human civilizations all over the globe and slavery continues to be a something we all profit from even today (which is something I think we may all be judged as "evil" for). In the US it's a very large and shameful part of our history, but I think it's probably better to face that openly rather than to try and sweep that shame under the rug by erasing anyone involved.

OTOH slavery is so morally abhorrent that it far outweighs any positive contributions a person might make in their lifetime. I think its good that society condemns it in the strongest possible manner, including by renaming

I can understand that others won't feel the same way I do.

Would you then support renaming the Washington monument? Removing any mention of his name from history books, or taking him off of our money? Should we take "Washington Crossing the Delaware" down from the walls of The Met and burn it?

I don't think that the bad things someone does should cause us to pretend that the good things never happened. We should see people for who they were, the good and the bad, even if in the end there was more of one than the other.

It might even be that the worse someone was, the more important it is that we shouldn't forget the good things. It helps remind us that everyone has the capacity for (and a history of) acts both good and evil and that even those who have done terrible things that could never be "made up for" (if that's ever even possible) are/were still capable of making the choice to do something wonderful.

Well, Washington was our first president, so he can get away with that. If chapters of the Audubon society want to rename themselves, I say let them. The living shouldn't be beholden to the dead. It's nothing but a name at this point Also he and Audubon weren't really known for upholding the cause of slavery. I think Mount Blue Sky (formerly Evans) is an example of something that ran the opposite direction. We all agreed it was better off not to commemorate a disgraced territorial governor.

> I think Mount Blue Sky (formerly Evans) is an example of something that ran the opposite direction. We all agreed it was better off not to commemorate a disgraced territorial governor.

Yeah, I don't have any problem with that one either. I'm not even sure what, if any, connection he had to the mountain. It's not like John Evans was super into mountains and inspired generations of others to get really into the enjoyment/study/preservation of mountains. It's really not clear what naming it after him was for exactly.

Changing the name of a landmark or a species may require thoughtful consideration but not an organization. Companies change names all the time and a bad name drags an org doing good work down. Why should employees have to come to work in the name of someone who doesn’t deserve it in the light of history.

I mean, half the country thought it was fine so you can automatically remove monuments to anyone who lived in the south and some parts of the north from 1619 to 1865. And yes I know only a small percentage owned slaves but that's because they were expensive not because no one else wanted to.

When it comes to monuments it's important to consider what it is they are honoring. We can keep monuments that celebrate the amazing acts of otherwise flawed people, but (as an example) I think that those monuments by the UDC which were created to glorify people because they fought for the right to keep slaves is something very different.

I'm not okay with the idea of destroying those kinds of statues and monuments, they are still artistic and cultural works after all, but they are probably best left to be displayed in civil war and civil rights museums where they can be contextualized appropriately.

You know what would be better than some mythical museum of context? Melting that garbage down into park benches or public toilets.

> You know what would be better than some mythical museum of context? Melting that garbage down

Do you think civil war/rights museums are mythical? I promise you that there are several and if you've never seen one you should really make the time. I'll warn you though that they are filled with many things you'd find extremely distasteful which is exactly how they should be.

Ugly as it is, it's our history. A group of KKK loving racists put monuments to their heroes up all over the place including state capitol buildings and courthouses and some remained for over a century. That actually happened.

Current and future generations should be able to see those monuments with their own eyes, the same way that they should be able to visit Auschwitz or the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. We need to confront our history and learn from it, not just erase the parts that make us uncomfortable. It would be wrong to take away that opportunity by destroying all evidence of the shameful things in humanity's past.

Renaming is probably counterproductive as many view erasing history with suspicion. We could more agree to actually fight slavery today, as there are more today than in years past.

This will be said, and said rightly, about a great deal of the things that you and I do every single day without thought.

Private, for profit prisons?

This is trolling, right? You think there’s a meaningful moral differences between whether the constituency for keeping more people locked up for longer are government employees or private sector companies?

Where is the line drawn? AFAICT we just outsourced slavery, which is equally abhorrent. We all own electronics, clothes, and other trinkets made under duress, and knowingly. Should we all be denigrated and forgotten for turning a blind eye?

Yeah I can't imagine history is going to be very kind to us https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57522186

Audubon was born into a world where slavery was considered a perfectly normal part of life and widely practiced. We don't have that excuse. We're supposed to know better than this. We just try to forget about the slaves that made our iphones and give a pass to the corporations responsible.

We do as all times do, glorify what we do, ignore the evil we do, and complain about those before us who did the evil we do not do.

It is “good that society condemns it in the strongest possible manner” and ideally never does it again. But the problem of this absolutist black-and-white view is that you’re missing a lot of details and nuance. Someone can be both good and bad, in fact all of us are. Everyone deserves to be commended for their good actions and vilified for their bad ones.

The other problem is when this all-or-nothing way of thinking escapes this kind of narrow case and seeps into the common public discourse, see the way politics are evolving in way too many western countries.

That said, renaming birds named after obscure figures is generally a good thing, descriptive names are more useful and don’t require knowledge of the historical background to make sense.

Not all the audubon societies are changing.

IMO it's ridiculous. Why not change the name of the Democratic parry while they're at it? They were the party of slavers.

Well, the Democratic party isn't named after a particular person for one.

Democratic is derived from the Greek "δῆμος", which was a term used to delineate free people from slaves

Demos means people, while slaves in antiquity were not considered people but living tools.

It's ridiculous. If we measured all past without nuance and with the fleeting standards of some people of today, everything would be abhorrent. I'm sad to see this way of thinking permeate so deep in our culture.

It doesn't look like any of them were comically racist and were just named after questionable people.

I was hoping there'd be things so antiquated you'd have to look it up, eg: stereotypes about people from Dalmatia or Tyrol based on some scandal from 1832.

if you want "a certain type of accuracy" in your bird paintings, dig up a copy of Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide(s) (to birds of various regions). Rather than painting or photographing "a" bird of a species, the books feature illustrations of average/representative birds with little arrows pointing out small features which are key to identifying that species as opposed to some other. It's been a long time since I did any birding, but after getting used to the simplicity of that method, it was difficult to adapt to others that I tried.

If you want the opposite type of accuracy, I recommend Matt Kracht's "Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America" or its sequel. While it does provide reasonably accurate drawings of many birds, its focus is more on insulting that specific bird, birds in general, and birdwatchers, with the sort of venom that can only come from someone who has a great deal of love for the subject.

> with the sort of venom that can only come from someone who has a great deal of love for the subject.

Or their neglected spouse.

"Oh, and birder is the word you have to use. One is a birder. If you say, 'I'm an expert bird watcher' you've automatically tipped off that you aren't a birder"

From the always entertaining "how to be an impostor" article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/magazine/how-to-be-an-imp...

I don't know if it's the same one but my uncle used to do the paintings for Field Guide To The Birds of Australia. He's very talented, and it's not just a job for him, he has always been obsessed with birds.

Images from the book https://artvee.com/books/the-birds-of-america/

Magpies are so gorgeous. Talk about striking plumage. The kingfisher paintings are nice too! Thank you for the link.

I would love a low-energy digital frame on my wall that could rotate through these and the fruit paintings from TFA. Delightful works to look at that deserve more time to experience than quickly scrolling through. One image per day could last years before I would have seen each of them!

Throw in the bird sounds and you'll live in a very different place.

There is a TV that can do that - Samsung The Frame.

And as an added bonus, it actually looks like a real painting during the day.

Huh, I doubted the "energy efficient" requirement and wow yep Art Mode only uses 30% of what its TV Mode uses.

I believe it can wake up based on movement sensors, which will help.

I jailbroke my Kindle Paperwhite just so I could set custom lockscreen images to these bird images. Looks fantastic on an e-ink screen

I was curious, and a random hit[0] claims there are 750-800 different species in America. So getting ~half of the total 200 years ago feels pretty good.

[0] https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/roam/how-many-birds-north-a...

In a way, I bet an ornithologist from a tropical country would envy how someone in North America can completely wrap their hands around the couple hundred species that exist there. In the tropics you probably have 800 different species in a 100 square miles.

That work gets a central role in a pretty good heist movie (or something along those lines, based on a true story): American Animals. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6212478/)

Did he paint the passenger pigeon?

He did: https://artvee.com/dl/passenger-pigeon#00

Coincidentally, all birds named after him are going to be renamed to dissociate with his legacy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/science/birds-ornithology...

For those of you intrigued by these watercolors, I highly recommend The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone about the botanist, David Fairchild, who is credited with introducing most of the foods we eat today to this country, starting in the 1890s. Many of the watercolors in the exhibit are the samples he and the other food explorers brought back to this country from their world travels. After reading this book, you will never look at the produce aisles in a grocery store in the same frame of mind again. A marvelous, remarkable read...

Covid stimulus should've funded cool stuff like this. Submit one watercolor painting per week to get that extra $600/wk federal unemployment

I think we need a bunch of peoples crappy watercolor paintings

Hey it doesn't need to be efficient when you're just throwing money around. Pay someone else to rank them and pick the best ones. Some amount of them will be good

This is such an interesting idea. Basically employ everyone receiving the stimulus as contractors to do something like this. A group of people make the paintings, a group assesses them for quality, others categorize and label. Every job is small and relatively straightforward while also giving something to show for the money!

Your low opinion of others is simply a reflection of the low esteem in which you hold yourself.

To be honest, I don't think I'm the only one who would agree that, if they hired me, the results would be crappy.

That’s actually a really cool idea. Like, make something. Anything. And you get paid.

I know some people would revolt against the idea that one should “have to do something to get welfare money” like it’s some sort of thumbing the nose at “welfare queens” or whatever. But no, it has a lot of very constructive benefits.

1) a person feels a sense of pride for earning money for something they created

2) they are building a portfolio of work and training themselves toward perhaps making it a meaningful career

3) we as a society may benefit by seeing some really astonishing work that we would never have discovered otherwise.

You don't need forced labor for that.

Most people did try out creative things during covid. Those that didn't aren't necessarily "rough diamonds", but likely just uninterested and unmotivated.

It's not forced labor. Your are welcome to not get paid.

Also, many people find a reason (even if arbitrary / contrived) useful for prompting creative endeavors

We had this in The Netherlands up to 1987 for artists only : the state ended up with a humongous collection of bad/mediocre art, which was eventually sold off through eBay(!)

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeldende_Kunstenaars_Regeling ( no English )

I feel like there's an implication that convincing people to make bad/mediocre art was a somehow a letdown, but that seems like a fine outcome to me if it got people to actually make art. Making bad art is inherent in the process of making good art. As written in the BRC Weekly last year:

> We need lowbudget art to inspire budgetless fledgling artists. We need art of all kinds as an indication that this is a place of radical self-expression and participation where people realize that anyone can be an artist.

How romantic. The practice at the time was though : in order to get the benefit, one had to produce a piece once in a while, so there were deadlines.

So lots of people smashed some paint on a canvas at that point in time and called it a painting.

Others might call this a scam or embezzlement. In particular when one is paying for it.

Sure, but the alternative discussed here is handing over the money to people that haven't produced art, mediocre or otherwise. This could hardly be considered more a scam or embezzlement scheme than that system.

Sorta related, but the government of Norway will purchase ~1000 books (meeting simple criteria) written by Norwegian authors & published by Norwegian publishing houses and then distribute the books to libraries, etc.: https://www.kulturdirektoratet.no/innkjopsordningene

All public domain too. Someone should make a card game using the art. I plan on using the art as set dressing in a game I'm making.

Link to the gallery: https://search.nal.usda.gov/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vi...

HN hug of death making site not load.

5 years back I made a dataset of these, the USDA Pomological paintings, available on GitHub:

https://github.com/jwilber/USDA_Pomological_Watercolors

THANK YOU! This is much easier for me than a torrent!

And the twitter feed based on these:

https://twitter.com/pomological?lang=en

And the equivalent mastodon account:

https://botsin.space/@pomological

Odd fruit YT gem: Jarad Rydelek: I spent 10 years trying to eat every fruit in the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB44-Chp3Rw

Wild! This fills me with joy for reasons I do not understand. Thanks for posting.

I feel the same. It's like this kindled a new interest, or the beginning of an interest, and I don't quite know what it is that is so interesting. I'm happy this is in the public domain and I'm gonna brainstorm things to do with it!

The usda.gov is unusable right now. Maybe its being slasdhdotted or maybe its always been unusable.

https://search.nal.usda.gov/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vi...

works perfectly and loads instantly for me

I think they're all or mostly mirrored here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:USDA_Pomological...

I love this, but could you imagine if this were something done today? In the current political climate and news cycles it would be "look at how the stupid {{political_party}} is wasting your tax dollars!" or probably every worse/dumber things than that.

This project wasn't undertaken for artistic reasons. It was done so that the US government had records and depictions of domestic produce that could be used in efforts to promote trade. Watercolors were almost certainly the best available option at the time.

Today it would be a waste of money. We have digital cameras and pretty good records of what produce American farmers grow without hiring several dozen artists to traipse around for years.

It creates jobs though, which is usually seen as positive, no? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Similar thread from March:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30546986

It would be nice to see if all those varsities still exist today and if they have changed in an appearance. I know that in my country a lot of old apples can no longer be found.

Is complicated. Most of them, not. Many European varieties where shamelesly renamed also in America for marketing or by cancel culture reasons (yup). Thus the fruit can exist but with its older name. Before DNA tests, It was a total mess.

Pursuing the desired variety to receive a modern clone substitute Is still a problem today.

I think the title should be qualified as 'edible fruit' because that's what this seems to be about, not any old fruit botanically speaking

i think the 'botanical definition of fruit' meme is getting a bit tired

Why? It's relevant here surely.

apparently not, as you admit

I've no idea what you're talking about. My point was edibility of fruit.

It’s only fruit if it’s edible?

HN guidelines suggest against editorializing headlines.

Would be still incorrect. Some of the pictures don't reflect edible fruit

Note that the text tags are often sloppy, e.g. the one just labeled "Citrus" in the text is "Pomerange" in the image.

“to its detriment– a friendly demeanor that allowed humans to approach and capture it with little resistance.” ugh, what a world.

The university I attended in Japan had in its library great original books from this era with similar illustrations.

Is there some similar publicly available catalog of mushroom painting? Asking for a friend...

Wow, this is so amazing. I wonder if these are available through an API?

I hope they'll put these on Flickr!

Seems to have missed out on durian.

The drawings are wonderful

guessing *edible fruit

I have nothing to say other than: I fucking love this

> over 7,500 paintings, drawings, and wax models commissioned by the USDA between 1886 and 1942...

> ...After investing $300,000, they had made $600 in fees in five years.

They couldn't get better art for 300k?! First inflation adjustment calculator I found says 300k in 1910 is 9.3MM today. Maybe, in a way this is reassuring though, that the world can maintain status quo since the late 1800s even with such frivolous misuse of public money.

I read it as $300k was the amount spent digitizing the paintings in ~2009. So about $40 per painting, which seems a bit high but I'm more curious what prompted them to digitize them at all.

Conservation.

Digitized objects can be "looked at" without exposing the originals to light, humidity, and tempreture changes (which cause slow degradation) and serve as a "record of original" should the originals be damaged or otherwise need restoration work.

I'm surprised the USDA cared about the originals enough to spend resources on conservation. Imagine the pitch meeting for the project.

"Let's spend $300k digitizing these old paintings of fruit, if we do surely we'll make a killing selling high def access to them. After all, nobody else has paintings of fruit, we'll have the market cornered!"

I'm not saying it's a waste that they did this, I'm curious how they decided to.

> if we do surely we'll make a killing selling high def access to them.

In my experience of Commonwealth ( Australia | UK | Canada ) public record conservation this never happens - nobody pitches profit via flogging access although that can arise as a useful side revenue.

The focus tends to be on record preservation, digital version of documents (for example) allow rapid indexed access and extends the lifetime of the original considerably.

The silos of the British library (for example) make the closing scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark look small in comparison.

The project included setting up a paywall to access the pictures, profit seems like it had to be a stated goal at some point, or at least a recouping of costs.

No, it's the same way here in the US. Archivists are important to government work and take their stewardship roles seriously. It's one of the more professionally principled groups I've worked with.

The scanning was funded through a grant from Ceres Trust, iirc.

Would be like saying that spending money in preserving corrosion on the original standard meter is a waste because now we can buy cheap plastic rules everywhere.

This pictures are like a patent to decide what is from who, so an essential administrative tool. They were useful for marketing, economical, educative and legal purposes. The economical value behind some of this fruit varieties in particular is incalculable and having official standardized pictures of its diseases for early detection saved billions probably

>Would be like saying that spending money in preserving corrosion on the original standard meter is a waste because now we can buy cheap plastic rules everywhere.

No, it's like saying it's a waste to create a replica of the original standard meter because it is no longer used to determine the length of a meter.

These paintings were likely useful, their continued use is less clear.

While this work is almost always funded by private grants, anyway, that's still not bad. You have to consider the other work that goes into this sort of thing. They don't have a flat bed scanner with some intern popping pdfs onto a network drive or bringing a stack down to the copy shop— there's cataloging, preservation, metadata analysis and recording (this was probably still all on paper with a lot of it handwritten,) storage, etc. Even a basic scanning setup to take perfectly even, color-accurate pictures of 140 year old paper... Plus people to manage the workers, manage the money, etc etc etc plus space to do it, storage of huuuuuge tiff images... $40 per painting is not bad.

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