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> There at some stand was boxes of old used post cards and 100 year old family photos. Photos of people posed on a porch in their Sunday best. Or just mundanely

> There at some stand was boxes of old used post cards and 100 year old family photos. Photos of people posed on a porch in their Sunday best. Or just mundanely standing around a car not everyone looking at the camera. > I'm not sure what the value of it all is if it just gets lugged around to various flea markets and sold piecemeal for $1 each. I purchase, scan, and resell those kinds of things. I'd love to have a centralized, public repository in which to store the data. As our tech gets better at extracting data from that material more and more interesting applications could be developed. Imagine being able to find 100+ year old photos of your ancestors via facial recognition and extracted metadata searches. I wish I could come up with a non-profit business model that worked for preserving that kind of stuff. I would love to gather up the historical ephemera that's being lost, catalog it via manual and automated processes, and make it available to the public. (Yes, I am aware there are privacy concerns. It's a pie-in-the-sky idea. I just hate to see all of the previously captured and curated effort that went into ephemera cast to the winds.)

jfil 2y ago
I've been thinking about the same topic recently, with a specific focus on antiquarian books. There is a local business I think of as a "Book Butcher". They buy an old book with beautiful engravings, cut out the pages and resell the individual pages as interior design pictures for hanging. Imagine if we could get them to scan & archive each book before pulling it apart... Another idea is simply archiving the graphics from eBay listings. Sometimes there is valuable information in the pictures that accompany listing, but they disappear forever once the item sells. I'd be glad to connect with anyone who's interested in this stuff.
- waltbosz 2y ago
  At the same flea market, there was a stand selling pages ripped from a book (I think it was a dictionary) and fed through a printer to add a picture to the page. I found the concept interesting, but the pictures they used were mostly bad. There were a few good ones, but most were pixelated Star Wars clip art kind of stuff or Jack Daniels logo.

jfil 2y ago

I've been thinking about the same topic recently, with a specific focus on antiquarian books. There is a local business I think of as a "Book Butcher". They buy an old book with beautiful engravings, cut out the pages and resell the individual pages as interior design pictures for hanging. Imagine if we could get them to scan & archive each book before pulling it apart... Another idea is simply archiving the graphics from eBay listings. Sometimes there is valuable information in the pictures that accompany listing, but they disappear forever once the item sells. I'd be glad to connect with anyone who's interested in this stuff.

waltbosz 2y ago
At the same flea market, there was a stand selling pages ripped from a book (I think it was a dictionary) and fed through a printer to add a picture to the page. I found the concept interesting, but the pictures they used were mostly bad. There were a few good ones, but most were pixelated Star Wars clip art kind of stuff or Jack Daniels logo.