Die New York Times, deren Archiv den doppeldeutigen Spitznamen "The Morgue" (= Archiv oder Leichenhalle) trägt, bringt Leben in selbiges und hat mit "The Lively Morgue" ein Tumblr-Blog gestartet, auf dem regelmäßig ausgewählte Fotos aus dem riesigen Fundus gepostet werden:
How many? We don’t know. Our best guess is five million to six million prints and contact sheets (each sheet, of course, representing many discrete images) and 300,000 sacks of negatives, ranging in format size from 35 millimeter to 5 by 7 inches — at least 10 million frames in all. The picture archive also includes 13,500 DVDs, each storing about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery. When the Museum of Modern Art set out to exhibit the highlights of the Times archive in 1996, it dispatched four curators. They spent nine months poring over 3,000 subjects, working with two Times editors, one of whom spent a year on the project. In the end, they estimated that they’d seen only one-quarter of the total. If we posted 10 new archival pictures every weekday on Tumblr, just from our print collection, we wouldn’t have the whole thing online until the year 3935. That’s a bit too ambitious. Instead, we’ll be dipping in and publishing several photographs each week, some of which will be available for purchase and some of which will be accompanied by a more extensive back story posted on the Lens blog. As we do so, we’ll gradually digitize at least the tip of the iceberg of this enormous trove, guaranteeing its continued utility and accessibility in the future ...Toll auch, dass man per Klick auf die Fotos deren Rückseite einblenden kann, die mit Anmerkungen, Notizen und Datum versehen sind. Alles in allem ein prima Projekt – auch wenn ich eine Lösung wie das Google gehostete LIFE Foto-Archiv besser gefunden hätte.
(via PetaPixel)
