How many other organizations have their collections on the Web? It doesn't seem to be many yet, but with time I'm sure this will grow. The Trolley Museum of New York's modest collections are listed on the Web with a handful of items imaged. The TMNY collection is small enough that it is in 'plain text' so Google and other search engines can hit it. So, here's a GoogleWhack (a Google search that results in a single hit) for you, please include the quotes: "brt metropolitan trolley".

(Of course the GoogleWhack only lasts until Google indexes this forum!)

Hi:

Our Museum has over 800 photos, post cards and other documents on the "Minnesota Reflections" website. Here's the link to the site: http://reflections.mndigital.org/cdm4/b ... OOT=%2Fmsn

All of the photos listed are a part of our collection (some in color) and prints are available for sale by going to our website http://www.trolleyride.org

Thanks!

There are two obstacles to digitizing such collections for online access.

One: Money. It takes a LOT of work to not just scan a photo/postcard, but also to properly catalogue the photo, entering in ALL relevant information. It is rare that photos/negatives have all relevant caption data with them (more typically they have none), and your typical intern or hired gun isn't going to be able to look at a photo of a steam locomotive and tell a 4-8-4 from a 4-8-2 or the Rock Island from the CB&Q, let alone recognize things like the CB&Q "racetrack" out of Chicago, Joliet Union Station, Strasburg's 31 before it was renumbered, or the kind of passenger cars behind the loco, or see that the negative accidentally got flipped. It's also tedious work, and as a result it becomes expensive and time-consuming. I saw a museum gain access to a collection of about 1,200 excellent black-and-white photos and their negatives; just a quick-and-dirty scan and photocopy of small prints and their caption info to produce a workable (but not publication quality) index archive and CD-ROM set took three months, as I recall.

Two: Rights. Just because you own the photo or postcard doesn't necessarily mean you have the rights to publish them, be it online or elsewhere. If you are extremely lucky, you acquired or had donated not only the photos but the rights. More typically, it's almost anybody's guess. I've dealt with a collection willed to a railroad museum where it quickly became apparent that the "photographer" flagrantly copied or reprinted many other photographers' works, and also bought prints from another photographer whose work is now still under copyright by the estate of said photographer. I know people with original O. Winston Link photo prints on their walls; that ownership doesn't convey the right to put them online.

One last question: What does one want to put online, and why? There are vast differences, both in content and mission, between, say, the Otto Perry or Baldwin builders' photo collections, the body of work of Richard Steinheimer, a photo of every last PRR or WP steam locomotive, and the photos posted at RailPictures.net.

[quote="Alexander D. Mitchell IV"]There are two obstacles to digitizing such collections for online access.

I can understand the points made. My interpretation of the original post is that the museums in question are posting postcard images that are not available to the general public. Currently I am working on collecting images from my home town, and if a museum has them posted on their website, it makes it that much easier for me. Many of the postcards that were in my home town library have been "misplaced" over the years, and are now seen on Ebay for outrageous prices. For the casual historian, such a collection of postcards posted on the Internet are an invaluable tool.

Romi Romano

The answer is to prioritize. Yes, it is time consuming and costly, but it can also be a revenue driver. The RRMofPA is doing a great job with this. Their model is probably worth looking at.

Rob

To answer Mr. Mitchell's last question, at TMNY the primary goal is to get all the photos cataloged and into archival safe storage. For the short term, imaging is secondary. The ones I've imaged so far is just to give people a sampler of what's in the archive. Over time I will be monitoring the number of visits that the archive lists receive from Google and other web sites to see if the information is really being used.

Time for the library to call the police. There's no statute of limitations on stolen property as far as I know. Some car collector bought a classic from out-of-state and tried to register it in California. It had been stolen 40 years ago from a California resident, who ended up getting his car back. The buyer? Not arrested, but left holding the bag.

Crowdsourcing. Photo categorization was one of its first practical applications.

It's surprisingly easy to get the public to do scut work for free, as long as they get to sit at home and do it on the computer and have something that resembles fun. Some people will put incorrect information, true; but for every person who gets it wrong there will be 3-4 others who will correct it.

Before putting material such as postcards on the web, one might want to investigate
if this usage is governed by DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

DPK

The first and obvious thing is to make sure you do it well, so that the resulting scans are useful years down the road.

I mentioned the Railroad Museum of PA. I am not sure of all the details, as I am just a researcher and customer of their services but I am highly impressed by what they are doing.

They have multiple photographic collections, and they are very good about the legalities around each, so you pretty much can pay for a scan or print and then get certain rights according to a fee schedule as applicable per each collection.

I recently purchased some Baldwin builders photo scans from negatives, scans of color slides and some scanned prints. Much of the catalog is online, though not all by any means. I was able to use the online text descriptions to know the reference numbers before I went to the museum.

On my last visit I dropped a couple of bills on scans - most already archived and a few done for me (that are now part of the archive, that's a good way to do it - scan 'em as needed). All the scans were high quality. I did not buy publication rights (most pics you can get one time rights for) but if the articles I am working on see the light of day, the compensation for publication will be addressed at that time.

The breadth of the collection is fantastic. Unfortunately, I think it is a well kept secret. Yes, there are loads of PRR goodies, but did ya think of the RRMof PA for Rutland? Milk cars? USRA?

Maybe one it is all online, more people will become aware of what they have.

For me, the staff at the RRMofPA is my first stop. They are doing a great job making the archives accessible online and off.

Rob

I've used the web to good effect to identify photos. I don't know if pointing people to a static web page that one person maintains counts as crowdsourcing, but periodically I post pictures with no identification and ask for help from the trolley community in forums such as this.