Digital Pioneers

Interview date: March 3, 2010 Denver, Colorado Summary: In terms of digitization for two dimensional things, in regards to the capturing of it, Lynch thinks the questions are really about color management strategies (where that is applicable), and about levels of quality and how one judges quality. Lynch finds there are a couple of tricky [...]

Interview date: March 3, 2010 Denver, Colorado Summary: Lynch saw the challenges as divided in to 3 stages. The first problem was the period before CD-ROM got stable, then there was the period where you were doing things on CD-ROM for most projects, doing work station delivery, then there was the period when you were [...]

Interview date:  March 3, 2010 Denver, Colorado Summary: By background and training, Lynch is a computer scientist, although he has spent most of his working life dealing with issues around information retrieval, library automation, computer networking, and those kinds of things. Lynch has been involved with various phases of libraries since about the mid 70’s [...]

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: Crane’s primary focus is open content. One of the biggest changes he has noticed is the shift  of using multiple digital resources in modern work. An innumerable amount of different resources are available for access. Crane sees a need for people to be able [...]

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: Crane’s involvement with digitizing goes back to 1982, when he was a graduate student and had access to the first chunks of electronic texts and magnetic tape. Crane remembers something like 60 megabytes of classical Greek texts that were typed in and available for [...]

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: Crane sees a lot of things that can now be done via the World Wide Web, but if the boundaries are pushed, problems arise and you run in to things that cannot be done generically. Crane thinks that the people in Google are inexorably [...]

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: From the start, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae designed all the data with concern for preservation and sustainability. The first data discs didn’t look very good and Crane and his colleagues knew it shouldn’t be made into their archival medium. In the 1980’s, it took [...]

Interview Date: March 4, 2010 Denver, Colorado Summary: Initially, the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESLP) set the standards for what images everyone would contribute (namely, the museums and the Library of Congress). The project looked at every Kodak on the market at the time, taking an image and compressing it. Using the lossless jpeg [...]

Interview Date: March 4, 2010 Summary: Besser is a Professor of Cinema Studies and Director of the Moving Image Archive and Preservation Masters Degree (MD) program at NYU. Besser has a zero percent time appointment as Senior Scientist for Digital Initiatives at NYU’s Libraries, working on projects with the Dean of Libraries. Besser has several [...]