
How Two Thieves Stole Thousands of Prints from University Libraries - apollinaire
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/robert-kindred-university-library-theft
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ljsocal
This interesting story reinforces the need to scan and publish these images
online. Keeping them locked up in dusty libraries denies the world the beauty
created by talented artists and printers.

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DanAndersen
From what I understand, the issue is that labor is limited compared with the
sheer volume of material to be digitized.

I wonder if any such libraries have considered programs for volunteers to come
in and digitize some materials. Would it be worth it for them to do some sort
of minimal training for people to learn to handle materials correctly, run a
scanner, and do data input? It's the sort of thing that I think I would find
enjoyable and meaningful to do as a weekend activity.

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notafraudster
Yep, you said it. The issue isn't actually scanning labor exactly. I was a
sysadmin for a mid-sized academic library's digital archives. We had 11
students working 10-20 hours a week (less during exams, more during break).
The burden wasn't the money paying the students, it was the digitization tech
(painting and large prints need plotter sized scanners + in general dealing
with very old stuff is problematic because of heat and light damage). Books
use sheet feed scanners if you're willing to debind them or flat bed scanners
if you aren't. Video digitization is a shit shoot because of the number of
formats and mechanical failures in hardware. We were just buying any spare
machine we could off eBay and local TV stations because no one could repair
stuff.

And even when you have the content digitized, hardware costs for arrival and
ingestion, and librarian time for the metadata citation are also limiting
factors.

The software most libraries use to present digital archives, CONTENTdm, is
supremely bad as well so there is some understandable trepidation about having
content scale faster than the interface to serve it does. I don't know if I
signed an NDA but there were some truly bad architectural decisions for
scaling, and at the time the back end was this repulsive binary flat file
format. We often had issues with failed writes breaking whole collections.

Storage is also a huge premium. If people are going to scan this stuff,
they're going to be saving at ultra-high resolution JPEG2000 or TIFF, not just
web resolution JPGs. At least this side of the equation has gotten easier over
time as storage gets cheaper.

I had a lot of fun in the job (enterprise storage + this being around the same
time that H264 took off) but I did get the sense that the level of investment
required to make progress was prohibitively more than what was available.

This would seem to me to be a great case for a large foundation offering a
digitization and open access grant specifically to scale and cover a project.

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dudus
Reminds me of a recent podcast from this American Life called "the feather
heist". Where a kid stole rare bird corpses from a museum to use the feathers
for fishing bait flies

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testplzignore
Is there a happy ending? What happened to the unreturned prints? And did the
unpunished thieves end up stealing more stuff without getting caught again?

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tspike
Yeah definitely felt half finished. Where are they now?

Edit: here's a more complete version of the story:
[https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/662854](https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/662854)

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petee
TLDR -- FBI got interested; charged in federal court, sentenced to 5 years.

I'm glad he got something for this...longer would have been nice though

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billturner
Sounds similar to what happened just recently at the Carnegie Library in
Pittsburgh's rare books collection: [http://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-
courts/2018/07/20/Two...](http://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-
courts/2018/07/20/Two-men-charged-with-stealing-8-million-rare-books-Carnegie-
Library-Greg-Priore-John-Schulman/stories/201807190205)

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teddyh
Sounds like a case for Bookhunter:

[http://www.shigabooks.com/bookhunter.php](http://www.shigabooks.com/bookhunter.php)

