26 Oct
2009
26 Oct
'09
2:16 p.m.
Philipp Hachtmann wrote:
See the Kiel PDP10 docs I mentioned: They were on
their way to the
dumpster, decision made by an academic person working as scientific
director. He did not consider the stuff worth keeping. Was he right?
Erik Brens walked along in the right moment, taking it all, finding
people who are willing to pay $$ for it. So the (historic) value can be
considerd a difficult to measure thing.
We have to make decisions like this all the time at CHM. The Boston museum
did as well, and they applied a different set of filters. It comes down to
having the resources available to archive it in some form, and making an
informed judgment if what you are looking at would have real value to either
you, or someone in the future (much harder). Then there is the value of the
paper artifact, or the information printed upon it.
It does sound like you need to get high speed scanning set up, though, if it
is coming down to not having the space to preserve the information in its
current form.