At 10:41 1999-10-13 -0700, you wrote: >> I saw the announcement concerning the MCN conference (October 27-30, >> 1999: Philadelphia) on the Humanist list. I attended a conference of >> scholars working in Ancient Near Eastern studies this past weekend in >> Chicago and the general sentiment was that most scholars cannot make >> useful images of texts and artifacts freely available due to >> restrictions from museums and other repositories. > >I am intrigued by the use of the word "freely" - I'm wondering whether >most scholars are prepared to pay the direct costs of providing images, >copyright issues notwithstanding. In our institution we have no >photographer on staff, so must hire one for new photography requests. >We are also debating how much of our staff's time we can reasonably ask >for reimbursement for: the time spent pulling objects and replacing them >in storage. > >-Carolyn Rissanen >-Registrar >-Oakland Museum of California
Here is something I wrote in a discussion of this particular issue earlier this year on another listserv. The example I used involved works of art, but the scenario when photographing artifacts is identical: "Photographing works of art is a costly business. Besides the specialist photographer, film, and developing, the man-hours of professional staff involved must also be included in the total cost: art handlers who remove the painting from (costly climate-controlled) storage or (costly climate-controlled) display and bring it to the studio and remove it from its frame, conservators who check the lighting to be used and vet it vis-a-vis the painting for UV, heat, and light absorption levels, curators who discuss the painting with the photographer so that he/she understands the importance of certain elements, colors, shadows, textures, varnish, etc., and the visual resources staff who coordinate all this, oversee the work, the post-production, labeling and cataloguing, as well as re-framing and return to storage or display of the work of art. Then there are the times we have to re-photograph again and again, using different photographers or different films, because the photographs didn't come out satisfactorily. To put it simply, we cannot afford to photograph a work in our collection unless we can hope to get a return on that investment." amalyah keshet head of visual resources, the israel museum, jerusalem board of directors, the museum computer network chair, mcn intellectual property special interest group akes...@imj.org.il
