
Tom Tryniski digitized nearly 50M pages of newspapers in his living room - dzdt
https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/tom-tryniski-fultonhistory.php
======
ilamont
Tom T., I salute you. For the past 10+ years, I have used hundreds of scans in
your archive to learn about my roots in small farming villages and factory
towns in northern and western New York. Thank you for not selling out to
Ancestry.com or Newspapers.com and keeping this resource free.

His devotion to old newspaper archives leads me to ask: How could vital
records and other paper archives at the municipal level be digitized and
indexed? What are the technical and legal considerations for such a project?

~~~
justin66
> How could vital records and other paper archives at the municipal level be
> digitized and indexed?

The typical business model is for a company to digitize the ones somebody
might want to look at someday and offer online access.

> What are the technical and legal considerations for such a project?

Legal: more than can be articulated here, but the FCRA is sort of the big one
that covers much more than you'd think. Technical: buy a scanner or two.

~~~
ilamont
In terms of scanners, are there models that can handle odd-sized books and
ledgers, many in fragile condition? This is where many old vital records and
documents reside.

Another issue for indexing: 18th, 19th and early 20th century handwriting
styles. Many clerks had good handwriting, but with lots of variation in style,
written over printed templates (marriage certificates, property and tax
records, etc). How good are modern OCR technologies recognizing variations in
handwriting?

~~~
justin66
There are a few different levels of digitization here if you're talking about
something like a county clerk or a state office or something.

You can digitize the documents with OCR (or by hand) and process them with a
level of precision great enough that you can archive or destroy the original
documents and just print out a new document when you need it. One example
would be the states that no longer issue a "real" birth certificate and just
print one out on official letterhead when there is a demand.

You can index the documents and stuff them in the basement, which is pretty
much the default for many county records. The computer is basically equivalent
to a card catalog in that case. The database might very well be a scanned card
catalog...

You can make a nice, pretty, OCR-enabled picture of the original document and
store it on a database. Searchability can vary.

Things like signatures and cursive writing will often just need to be
interpreted by a human during the process of digitization. If such records
aren't important enough to justify a few minutes of someone's time, they might
not ever be digitized.

There's a lot of variance here. A state agency like a Department of Motor
Vehicles has a strong motivation to make things more efficient and the
advantage that none of the records are really ancient. A county clerk in a
poor, rural county has completely different resources and needs.

------
akudha
There is something awe inspiring about people who spend long times doing
something they love without expecting much in return, for public good. These
are the projects that need to be supported so they are able to do it as long
as they physically can.

Huge respect for not selling.

Anyone know of more examples?

~~~
faux_intellect
Casey Neistat is someone who comes to mind. He has chronicled so many moments
of his life on video and shared them with the world.

~~~
Buge
He's expecting something in return though, money from ad revenue.

~~~
faux_intellect
Casey started monetizing his channel much, much later. In my view, the footage
he has amassed and shared on Youtube over the years shares parallels with what
Tryniski is doing, namely, he has provided people with a visual account of
what it is like to live in New York City at a particular time in history.
While obviously different than what Tryniski does in that it is more
autobiographical, I definitely think it'll be significant if not now then in
the future, especially as the city develops more and changes over time.
There's been a lot of footage he has captured that only he has captured, e.g.,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKOdMA97FGM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKOdMA97FGM)

~~~
Buge
Do you have a source for him monetizing his channel much later? The way he
describes it in this video[1], he says he made a series for HBO (around 2010),
then a couple films, then shifted his focus to youtube. It sounds like he
considered it at that time his main income source. The youtube partner program
launched in 2007. Even if he wasn't monetized right away, the idea of
monetization in the future was likely a motivation. In this video[2] he
describes his dream as making money making videos.

The video you linked was uploaded in 2016, certainly long after he started
monetizing his videos. The title doesn't seem to be aimed at sharing
information with future generations. The title is vague and non-descriptive.
It's in all caps and clickbaity. The title is nearly the same as this over
video of his[3] which is about a completely different event. Many of his other
videos have vague clickbaity titles and thumbnails, sometimes the titles are
misleading.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Y-ahQFQDA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Y-ahQFQDA)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ_z48aJD5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ_z48aJD5o)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJoDRUybisw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJoDRUybisw)

~~~
Kagerjay
IIRC Casey Neistat didn't start vlogging daily until 2014

I've watched a vast majority of his videos. Some of his videos date back in
early 2000s as well, during times he did work for local political campaigns

His motivation is making a living doing what he enjoys doing, which is telling
stories. He's said that many times over already. Youtube was his way of
bridging his experiences from cinematic private production in hollywood and
bringing it to the masses so everyone can enjoy it. 368 is just his next
brainchild after the downfall of beme

------
vanderZwan
> _Tryniski has no formal training in archiving and isn’t particularly
> interested in working with any of the various other online newspaper
> directories, especially those with regimented archival requirements. He has,
> on occasion, been approached by companies looking to partner with him or
> purchase licenses to his archives. He’s turned them all down, including one
> offer for half a million dollars._

I do hope his material is free to be stored on Archive.org at least? Or
perhaps even his entire website. It would be terrible if this resource would
disappear

~~~
Kadin
Yeah, that was sort of my reaction as well. It's great that the guy is doing
what he's doing, and I respect his desire not to sell to some vampire-squid
monetizer who will paywall all of it for revenue maximization, but ... what's
his backup strategy? What's his estate plan? Does whoever is going to inherit
his house know that there's more to that giant pile of hard drives, besides a
task to be farmed out to 1-800-GOT-JUNK?

I am concerned that this entire effort is one sloppy-street-crossing or one
house fire away from being gone forever.

------
dzdt
Its amazing that an individual, working just with their own time and money in
their own house, is so outpacing efforts like that of the Library of Congress.

~~~
skookumchuck
Not amazing at all. Those bureaucracies spent their time planning, budgeting,
arguing, doing studies, etc., while Tom Tryniski just puts the microfilm in
the scanner and scans it.

~~~
Lucent
That's a neat soundbite, but it's committees, planning, arguing, and meetings
that got us the protocols underpinning an open internet that are holding up
decades later. Not to discount his work, but wouldn't it be great if he sat
down with some people who argued for the best format to store and deliver it?

~~~
skookumchuck
I talked to a museum archivist about this once. She was obsessed with getting
the best scans possible with the best equipment and budget. So no scans at all
were done.

~~~
pjc50
Given that some book scanning processes are destructive, and the presence of a
digital archive may be a pretext to dispose of the physical one, and you'll
never get budget to digitise it again .. this may not be the worst decision.

------
dehef
Not being ironic, I really like his website. Brutalism amateurs should take a
look [http://fultonhistory.com/](http://fultonhistory.com/) That is the
perfect example (on desktop), no regard for the design, still perfectly
functional (including back button etc..).

Edit: just noticed the use of jAlbum for the gallery. Just adding +1 to
nostalgia :)

~~~
bni
Wants me to install something called flash, no thanks

~~~
culot
Flash isn't necessary to use the site. It seems to be used for a PDF display
portion of the archive search's split-pane view. The search results are
displayed fine without Flash.

------
mhb
Somewhat related: _Nicholson Baker didn 't expect librarians to act like
barbarians - but then he learned they were destroying or dumping millions of
books and newspapers. He tells Oliver Burkeman why he had to take a stand._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17644080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17644080)

------
skookumchuck
He reminds me of the woman who obsessively taped local TV news broadcasts for
decades, and wound up with the only surviving record of those shows. Truly an
invaluable service both of them did and are doing.

~~~
pronoiac
Ah, yes, Marion Stokes: [https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-
sections/features-issue...](https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-
sections/features-issue-sections/16582/vhs-internet-archive-news/)

Wikipedia reports she left 71,716 VHS tapes of news recordings. The Internet
Archive is on it.

~~~
voltagex_
This is a good time to remind everyone to donate to the Archive:
[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

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hycaria
Am I the only one who feels that the author's withering rant about Tryniski
opinions, and her blabber about free press is an undelicate and unneeded
addition only to push some agenda ?

Like, is it really the point of his project ? Are his views expressed anywhere
in his archives ? Why be so judgmental ?!

~~~
pmyteh
The CJR is a journal about the press; its writers' opinion that a free press
is vital is nailed on.

I don't read it as trying to push an agenda (which I suspect the author
believes is shared by her readers) but to explore the tensions between
America's tradition of a viciously partisan press and its 20th Century ethic
of studied neutrality, and of tensions between the press as abstract apple-
pie-and-motherhood and distrust of actual publications (the archivist's
selection of Fox over other media, and the observation that even in their
heyday there was commercial pressure for small town press not to do
investigative reporting).

If you find arguments about the state of the press distasteful I can see why
you wouldn't like the last section. But I found it quite interesting.

------
known
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man." \--George Bernard Shaw

------
jay-anderson
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVWDX6oaYCg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVWDX6oaYCg)
\- here's an older video about him. Pretty interesting. We need more home
archivists (or whatever the proper word is) like him. There's so much stuff
out there that would be interesting to search through.

~~~
roboyoshi
> We need more home archivists

We are out there on r/DataHoarder, and on some obscure trackers like Myspleen.
I hope that when I'm older I can preserve some history stuff as well for the
greater good.

------
orliesaurus
Looks like we need more capeless heroes like Tom Tryniski!

------
rmason
What Mr. Tryniski has done is more than admirable. But unfortunately he has
failed in one aspect and that has to be as a leader. When he dies whatever
number of pages have been archived all efforts will cease.

If he had volunteer helpers and a foundation he could will money to help them
keep it going.

~~~
iopuy
This guy digitizes over 50M pages for the greater good and you're calling him
a failure?

~~~
theoh
"... in one respect"

