|
I understand some of the reasons people want to possess and keep photos to themselves. I know from personal experience that there are countless photos I purchased of German aircraft back in 1979 from an estate say in Austin, TX. I am so damn lazy, and because there are no Triplanes in the collection, I’ve never scanned them, it is unfair of me to keep them to myself but I paid a lot of money for them and feel a sense of loss if I just give them away. As such, I understand why a lot of folks do not post some of their pictures…..but when you’ve already scanned them in?
None the less, part of this thread is to promote the OPENSOURCE of WW1 images and documents. I had planned on bringing this up way down range and then starting another thread on it. Suffice it to say, as a technologist who has dealt with archival mechanisms for medical, radiological geospatial and massive archival information systems for more than 30 years, I speak from authority when I say… IT IS WITH IN OUR GRASP to change this situation for the better.
To remake the notion of archive for our collections and the collections of others we only need to band together, the way the four or five folks did that originally created C&C. We could create a Wikipedia like interface over massive digital copies of our material, that a select and approved community of (WW1 WIKIPEADIANS), if you will, can collect, collate, sort, annotate and weight copies from originals such that when you or I search the archive, we find exactly what we want and a whole lot more: the product of an intelligent collection working itself to solve problem and resolve questions. Like Google: the bigger it gets the more connections it can make between photos and the more intelligent its responses to our questions. As time marches on, it will
get bigger and more intelligent as we interact with it.
In such a system, due to just a few years of annotation (due to the casual work of the WIKIPEADIANS), you would be able to follow a machine or person through its life on the front. You would see the comments from the likes of Achim Engles, or Ron Bloomquist concerning modern construction, or the comments of Udo Jorges on original engine design and performance, metallurgy and the likes. The images would weave a chronological web against one another, from which we could draw new conclusions that were not at all apparent when all the photos were split asunder. The aerodrome (a privately held resource), is not the correct venue for this collection, but we could find one and leverage it I’m sure). The design and software for such a site already exists and is free, all we have to do is commit to one another to using it and champion it as did the first Wikipedia’s a few years back.
If anyone is interested we can start a new thread and mark the beginnings of that effort, I have a particular pile of pictures in mind that could be used to jumpstart this effort, and once that effort catches fire, I feel that most collectors would open their collections to it in the long run, especially since they can keep their original photos in their desk drawer while contributing
|