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> 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

by toolz 3y ago

> 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.

boomboomsubban 3y ago
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.
- defrost 3y ago
  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.
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    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.
    - defrost 3y ago
      > 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.
      - boomboomsubban 3y ago
        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.
      - chefandy 3y ago
        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.
    - mrjudgejoebrown 3y ago
      The scanning was funded through a grant from Ceres Trust, iirc.
    - pvaldes 3y ago
      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
      - boomboomsubban 3y ago
        >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.
- chefandy 3y ago
  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.

by toolz 3y ago

boomboomsubban 3y ago

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.

defrost 3y ago
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.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  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.
  - defrost 3y ago
    > 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.
    - boomboomsubban 3y ago
      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.
    - chefandy 3y ago
      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.
  - mrjudgejoebrown 3y ago
    The scanning was funded through a grant from Ceres Trust, iirc.
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    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
    - boomboomsubban 3y ago
      >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.
chefandy 3y ago
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.