4 ms·

Its amazing that an individual, working just with their own time and money in their own house, is so outpacing efforts like that of the Library of Congress.

• Swizec 8y ago
  No meetings and decision commitees.
  • pjc50 8y ago
    No accountability. Nobody's going to come and ask criticise how he spent their grant money, why he chose this paper over another, etc. Distrust of the public sector leads to excessive accountability requirements that often take up a large fraction of the project cost, maybe even more than half.
• skookumchuck 8y ago
  Not amazing at all. Those bureaucracies spent their time planning, budgeting, arguing, doing studies, etc., while Tom Tryniski just puts the microfilm in the scanner and scans it.
  • Lucent 8y ago
    That's a neat soundbite, but it's committees, planning, arguing, and meetings that got us the protocols underpinning an open internet that are holding up decades later. Not to discount his work, but wouldn't it be great if he sat down with some people who argued for the best format to store and deliver it?
    • skookumchuck 8y ago
      I talked to a museum archivist about this once. She was obsessed with getting the best scans possible with the best equipment and budget. So no scans at all were done.
      • pjc50 8y ago
        Given that some book scanning processes are destructive, and the presence of a digital archive may be a pretext to dispose of the physical one, and you'll never get budget to digitise it again .. this may not be the worst decision.
    • wgjordan 8y ago
      David D. Clark, Chief Protocol Architect of the development of the Internet in the 1980s, famously wrote this similar neat soundbite: We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
  • Kadin 8y ago
    The microfilm he's scanning is a government product. He's doing a better job making the output of a government project accessible to the project, but except where he is actually scanning the paper newsprint itself, he is building on the work of others, much of it taxpayer-funded. Credit where credit is due.
• privateSFacct 8y ago
  you clearly haven't worked in govt. Govt not that great at quickly getting something done. Govt IS pretty good at keeping on doing something though. That can be an underrated benefit of govt.
• Spooky23 8y ago
  That's an unfair characterization. He's scanning the product of the New York State Newspaper Project, which is/was a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1982-2010 and the New York State Library/Archives. That project got access to these old newspapers, scanned the paper to microfilm, etc. That required alot of time and money. Tom does a cool thing, but he's utilizing the work product of the government, mostly using the library system to provide him with the films at little or no cost, and will almost certainly sell the collection either himself when he needs to or via his estate. Meanwhile, the microfilms will be around for hundreds of years.