Reposting their Facebook post; this will have to be the wave of the future--making our archive holdings that otherwise sit unseen for decades available and accessible to the public that otherwise will never know what you have:



More on NS charitable giving: http://www.nscorp.com/nscportal/nscorp/ ... ation.html

Highly deserved! Good job RRMofPA!

Rob

Great job NS Corp.

interesting, I thought NS was holding all the archives and doing all the work.
60k seems generous, but if you have volunteers working it, no cost there.

A lot of carefull archival work there and photo plates sensitive to certain situations.


I recall some old films made with silver Citrate, when you opened the canisters they disintegrated immmediatly on opening them.

We should all beg the NS to consider redirecting their money to the Penn St Archives Baldwin collections. They are worth more to more people than the museums collections and for future generations its all valuable, but the museums collections are accessible the Archives are mostly not.

Some guys have died still waiting on the PN. St Archive Baldwin collections to be finished, I've only been waiting for about 20 years.

I'd put the money towards that long before I put it into the RR museum collections.

JMHO

NS made the decisions they did for their own reasons. If you'll review both releases I linked to, this $60K is but a small portion of their charitable giving.

Proper cataloging and archiving is, to put it bluntly, a rhymes-with-witch. It's not just scanning; it's also entering enough information in whatever archiving/cataloging system that someone who is looking for that photo has a prayer of finding it.

Take just one photo someone sent me today: a PRR 2-8-0 involved in a wreck in my hometown. Look what all I need to have to have a prayer of proper cataloging: PRR, 463, 2-8-0, wreck, collision, Selinsgrove, Selin's Grove [the old spelling], Pennsylvania, Sunbury & Lewistown, wreck, Class R [old classification], Class H3, the date..... Your cataloging has to be good enough for someone looking for PRR collisions, the S&L, Selinsgrove, 463 or the date/year.

Multiply this by a quarter-million. Just for photographs.

Volunteers can be trained to do grunt work, but the burn-out rate is high. And rare is the volunteer with both a competent sense of archival conservation and the "walking encyclopedia" knowledge of railroads this kind of job requires.

Sure, I'd love to be able to just sit here, type a few keystrokes, and get a high-resolution builder's photo of any Baldwin-family locomotive. That ain't happening anytime soon. I would consider it nothing short of a miracle if the collection could at least be cataloged completely and competently. As it is,places like the RR Museum of Pa. and the Md. Rail Heritage Library are frantically dog-paddling just to keep abreast of the stuff they have and which constantly walks in, desirable or no.

Have YOU volunteered with your local railroad archive lately?

Oh heavens yes, the Western Railway Museum has an impressive archive and they have their work cut out for them. I work in the mechanical shop, overhead lines and sometimes track. The problem is if I so much as set foot in the archive, the other departments will never see me again.

Anyway... you are right, one of the greatest problems is connecting photos to experts capable of tagging them accurately. I can think of a technological solution to that, but it would require people to soften their death-grip on copy rights.

This looks like a cluster computing problem, but with experts instead of computers. MapReduce meets Mechanical Turk.

1. Photo owner digitizes photo and makes best effort to tag it.
2. Volunteer users sign up, and "Tag" themselves, listing their areas of expertise.
3. System uses available tags to dispatch photos to those most likely to be experts on that photo.
4. Experts view photos, review correct add tags.
5. Photos are recirculated to other experts until knowledge or controversy cease to flow.

Thus, RRMofPA gets their "S.N." photos tagged properly by BAERA volunteers who get their CA&E photos tagged properly by IRM volunteers whose DUR photos are tagged properly by MiTM volunteers, and round and round it goes, pay it forward.

For an expert, the incentive is to get to see a dizzying variety of photos on their subject interest.

This concept requires contemporary views on copyright, which is why it'll go nowhere in the railfan community.

Not only did I send a written proposal about helping a very prominent collection that I will not name, I offered to recruit and setup an entire group of volunteers to work on Saturdays one or twice a month (the institutions option) with the express intention of recataloging (to the catalog system used by all the other "like" collections) and they declined all my help and all the help of any other "volunteers". They must look either incompetent (which they are) to have us helping them, and also must have more job security or some way of looking great by not having us help them. Thats all I can yjomhk of to justify turning away the entire concept of free competent help.

Looking at their catalog, its clear that they have no clue what they should be doing. They all also make nice livings off our dead buddies by selling their collections back to us "the living" for $25-30 a page. Collections that were donated for free. Not a back racket to be in huh?

$60,000 actually doesn't sound like very much to fully conserve and digitize a collection of that size. Is the grant augmenting a conservation program already in progress for the collection?

Regarding the comment about distributing photos to a group of experts for identification, I do that to a small degree already for the Trolley Museum of New York's photos. There's a "Mystery Photos" section on the web page inviting people to provide information and I occasionally post photos that I can't identify to various forums. I'd say about 90% of the stuff I've posted was very quickly, thoroughly, and as far as I can tell--accurately, identified. However, a central "crowdsource" mechanism that would allow submitting photos for identification by a distributed group of experts does sound very useful.

By the way, even though but a small fraction of the TMNY photo collection has been scanned, the archive photo viewer by far receives the largest number of hits than anything else on TMNY.org.

Referring to a previous post, we could always use guidance as well. Located in the belt of Illinois corn and soy, we are self contained and listen for better ways to do it. Digitization is a small part of the problem. Storage, access and control of original material takes a lot of effort. For those complaining about cost or lack of effort, it is best to remind that many like we are on their own and those hard earned dollars (we are told we undercharge) have bought the digital document scanner to pdf's, the 8x10 negative scanner to at least 600 dpi tif's (Bob Webber responsibility), and with help from the North American Railway Foundation to get it, the Oce drawing scanner to 300 dpi tif's. In addition, we are cataloging the Haskell & Barker freight car drawings (mostly 1906 to 1925) after removing them from tubes and archival taping fragmentary drawings to the 3 ft drawing paper before scanning. Hence the copyright nature of this private collection must be preserved, regrets to those who might expect legal recourse as a last resort, please be kind and respect the purpose of copyright which protects the donor and benefits the archive. We have original Osgood and Bradley builders prints, will not supply copies instead referring potential customers to the Worcester Historical Society who now possess the negatives. It works both ways! Better storage of our otherwise inaccessible Pullman freight car lot documents comes closer as we restore a baggage car for stacking and access. Please send donation money to the various archives if you want the material preserved, $60k is a drop in the budget adding in salaries. Here, we are all volunteers and those fees cover costs of operation and restoration. It takes strong guidance to open up new avenues and the energy to do it. I suggest staying involved and that avenue spoken of will eventually open, or another equally worthwhile. Sincerely, Ted Anderson, IRM Pullman Library curator

The posts above bring up a real double-edged sword:

To properly preserve any such photo, negative, or document collection for future generations requires two things:

*Proper preservation: This incorporates everything from the right kind of plastic sleeves for the photos to the survivability of the controlling organization, from the temperature control and fire suppression of the building to the knowledge and training of the archivists.

*Accessibility: This incorporates the ability of a person to find out the stuff exists in the first place to the ability to browse the photos/information, the ability (or lack thereof) to reproduce the photo for personal or commercial use or reference, the ability or lack thereof to upload photos to an online archive or send a scan by e-mail, etc.

These objectives are, oddly, at odds with one another. Open library shelves mean books vanish, no matter how many fines you may impose or how many security measures you may incur. (I've replaced the same book for one county's library twice already.) If you don't charge fees, you can't pay for proper facilities and cataloging. Charge too much, and nobody wants to bother with you. And it costs real money to scan photos competently and maintain the server space, whether you're the Pawnee County Library or the Library of Congress.

Take a classic example: Some model manufacturer wants to build a model of a locomotive, say the famous Ma & Pa #6. I can probably pull up working blueprints and lots of detail photos of the locomotive if I try hard enough. What's the effort worth to him? Can I provide something better than he might get from thumbing through back issues of Model Railroader or Live Steam? Then what if I find that they're in a Ma & Pa Preservation Society magazine or publication? Shouldn't the Ma & Pa group get a "cut of the action"? Or do we just "eat" that as part of the "price" for getting a Ma & Pa model out there in the public eye/hands?

The Norfolk Southern grant is targeted explicitly towards getting the RRMusPa online and accessible to the public. That's a critical example of the "public-private" partnership that has to happen with preservation. There aren't enough dollars in Commonwealth coffers, and if there were there are about 62,961 things I would put at a higher priority than that for tax dollars.

If the photos are available on-line it can be very simple to solicit assistance in obtaining more/better detailed information. Simply have a "feedback" or "comments" option associated with each file. This obviously can't be a wiki-type thing where anyone can post comments for all to see, correct or incorrect, but a way to allow knowledgeable persons a way to have input. For instance:

I was looking through parts of the Georgia Digital Library a week or so ago and came across a photo of a railroad location in Atlanta with which I was familiar. I've been away from Atlanta for 15 years now, and the area has changed considerably, but there were enough features recognizable to me that I was confident I knew what/where it was. The caption indicated there was no knowledge of the location by the researcher who had entered the caption, but even with all the physical changes of the area you can still take a similar photo today.

The photo happened to be in a collection held by an institution that requires one to register as a user of their on-line database, which I did not want to do, so I simply emailed the Digital Library with my comments and a suggestion to forward it to the other institution with a brief explaination of why I was doing it that way. They did forward the info, and a couple of days later I received an email stating that the holder of the image, in discussion with other people, agreed with my suggestion of the location ID and would be correcting the caption.

Now, that's a lot of effort/time to correct one caption of a photo that I thought anyone in Atlanta would be familiar with, but it has now been properly identified. Time and money. That's what it always comes down to, and I congratulate RRMPA for pursuing and being awarded the grant from NS Foundation.

More from the Lancaster newspaper, via the RRMusPa's Facebook page (hey, are YOU doing your part to keep your place in the public eye like this?):

http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/351481