P3D Stereo repositories

[roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (John W Roberts)]

>Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 14:34:30 -0700
>From: fj834@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Dr. George A. Themelis)
>Subject: P3D Books vs. stereo images

>John Roberts writes:
>>...With keywords, and
>>multi-dimensional computer indexing, finding a slide you want should be
>>hundreds or thousands of times faster than an exhaustive search.

>Interesting thoughts John but let's face reality here.  Personal images and
>books are two completely different things.  Books are published material. 
>Personal pictures are... well, just personal pictures.  

If you were to make the effort to carefully review the question you asked
and the reply I posted, you would find that my answer was targeted toward
the specific question you asked: "I have only one question:  How far can it
grow before it becomes unmanageable?". My response was that modern technology
could make management of a large collection of pictures much more convenient
than you appear to think. My discussion was of the mechanism of this
organization - not an implication that books are the same thing as photographs.

>Unless our society
>decides that storing and indexing stereo images is a top priority for our
>survival and advancement as human beings, something that by the looks of
>things is not likely to happen, these ideas (cataloging stereo personal
>slide collections) will remain a dream...

I disagree. I don't think society considers sports statistics to be a top
priority for survival and enhancement, and yet tremendous effort goes into
them just because a sufficient number of people have been persuaded that 
they're interested in them. (FYI, the combined win-loss streak turnaround of 
the Colts' victory on Sunday has never been equalled except in 1962 and 1983.
Not that I'm interested - I just heard it on the news. :-)   There may be 
enough interest even now to justify cataloged archives of several
million stereo images.

>Do you know of any person who has authored 300,000 books and all these
>books are handed to one person or library to catalog  (case of Harold
>Lloyd's stereo slides)?  In Lloyd's case, the pictures were organized
>(cataloged?) by his granddaughter and other relatives.  

If Harold Lloyd's granddaughter is too busy, perhaps somebody else can do your
slides. :-) Or if you can manage to live another ten years, there may be
computer programs which are sufficiently sophisticated to do a fair job of
sorting and cataloging without much human effort involved.

>Again, it makes no sense to compare existing library systems (built because
>of the recognition of the importance of books in our society) to
>preservation of stereo images which are in the hands of a few volunteers
>right now and of interest to a very small group of people.

It sounds like you're advocating that image repositories deliberately keep
their holdings small enough that the continued use of awkward and obsolete
cataloging techniques can be justified. I don't see groups with other interests
doing that sort of thing - the radio amateurs don't limit their transmissions
to ten miles to save on the cost of equipment, and genealogists don't limit
their studies to two generations to save on data entry and storage 
requirements. Other folks are trying to push the envelope, to improve on
the practices of the past. *One* of the objectives of 3D photography is to
capture and preserve stereo images. Rather than being resigned to the thought
that the archive of 3D images will never be larger or better organized than
it is now, I would encourage some creative thought on how that can be changed.

>The most important question is who's stereo images are of interest to the
>general public?  

None of them. But there does seem to be considerable interest among some
members of the stereo community, which might be enough to support an expanded
role for image repositories. In addition, as I have mentioned before, I would
like to see an enormous increase (say, three or four orders of magnitude) in
the number of stereo enthusiasts within the current population. If that can
somehow be accomplished, both the incentive and the need for more organized
cataloging will be more obvious.

>Dan gave the most sensible solution:  A couple of hundred slides
>(representative of my life and work, including some potentially valuable
>historical images) to the NSA library, the rest to collectors and people
>who appreciate stereo (including, hopefully my family).  

Well, donating a few hundred slides is very nice of you, but how are any of us
qualified to judge which several hundred out of 50000 would be the most
appreciated in the future? Bob Wier had an excellent post on this topic on
November 14. Some of the people who have posted on this topic seem to feel
that they want their work to be remembered and appreciated after they're gone.
While obviously they would want to weed out images that they dislike or that
they consider embarrassing, they might want to preserve a larger number among
the images they like, to increase the odds that some will be liked in the
future. It would be in the interest of this group to think of better ways to
archive and organize their images. If some of the preparatory work were done
ahead of time, it might be easier for image librarians to deal with them.

John R


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End of PHOTO-3D Digest 2406
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