Thing is,
I've dealt with a number of 'professional' archivists who
couldn't/wouldn't find docs for me. Either they'd didn't know if they had
them, or they couldn't easily get to them, or they were too valuable to
look at (which begs the question as to why on earth they need to be kept
if they aren't going to be used as a source of information).
Indeed if they were "professional" then they would be accomodating to get
the so-called "too valuable to look at" docs in a form which could be
looked at by folks like us or other types of researchers.
Agreed. For most documents produced in the last 200 years, the important
feature is the information that they contain, not the paper/ink that they
were produced with. So looking at a good copy would be equally useful.
I can fully understand that making copies can damage documents. So why
don't they make 1 good copy using whatever technique causes the least
damage and then treat that as a semi-raare document that can be inspected
carefully by interested people? If it gets damaged (through excessive
copying, perhaps), then they could make one more copy of the original.
But if the original is damaged in some way by making the copy (the pages
may crumble just in handling), shouldn't the original be saved with the
hope that a method of duplicating that doesn't destroy the original with
be found in the next few years? Also, if the pages fall apart with
with handling, it may not be possible to make a copy at all.
Proposal for copying really OLD documents (I get a royalty if someone
does this and it works!)
1) Develop a machine that performs a CAT scan of the document
without opening it at very high resolution.
2) process the high resolution 3D images captured to determine
the ink patterns on each page.
3) OCR the individual pages to recreate the original text
Simple, Right?
clint
