Cuneiform Archives Lost
Italo
Looters May Have Destroyed Priceless Cuneiform Archive
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 18, 2003; Page A23
Looters at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities pillaged and, perhaps,
destroyed an archive of more than 100,000 cuneiform clay tablets -- a
unique and priceless trove of ancient Mesopotamian writings that included
the "Sippar Library," the oldest library ever found intact on its original
shelves.
Experts described the archive as the world's least-studied large
collection of cuneiform -- the oldest known writing on Earth -- a record
that covers every aspect of Mesopotamian life over more than 3,000 years.
The texts resided in numbered boxes each containing as many as 400
3-inch-by-2-inch tablets.
The Sippar Library, discovered in 1986 at a well-known neo-Babylonian site
near Baghdad, was one of the archive's crown jewels. Dating from the sixth
century B.C., it comprised only about 800 tablets, but it included hymns,
prayers, lamentations, bits of epics, glossaries, astronomical and
scientific texts, missing pieces of a flood legend that closely parallels
the biblical story of Noah, and the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi, the
ancient Babylonian lawgiver.
"This is the kind of discovery that one waits 100 years to see," said
Yale's Benjamin Foster, curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection. "And
now we'll never have another chance. It's a tragedy of the first order."
Foster said only about two dozen of the Sippar Library tablets have been
fully analyzed and published.
UCLA Assyriologist Robert Englund noted that while some of the Sippar
material was similar, at least in part, to works in earlier finds, "the
vast majority of at least 100,000 texts in the archive are unique, very
poorly documented and barely studied, if at all. I'm more fearful for
these losses."
The extent of the damage is not yet known, but experts at a United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization meeting in Paris
yesterday confirmed that looters smashed or stole thousands of tablets.
McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago's Oriental
Institute, told reporters that he had spoken with museum officials in
Baghdad, and that the archive "has apparently been lost."
The Bush administration, warned by U.S. scholars early this year about the
museum's vulnerability, has reaped harsh criticism for failing to prevent
the looting, which was not challenged by U.S. soldiers patrolling
Baghdad's streets.
While early concern focused on the destruction of world-famous artifacts,
the small corps of linguists, Assyriologists and epigraphers who study
early writings -- perhaps 200 experts worldwide -- was distraught over the
lost texts.
Stony Brook University archaeologist Elizabeth Stone was a graduate
student in 1975 when she spotted a cuneiform exhibit related to her
dissertation. Iraqi museum authorities told her she didn't have the
credentials to merit special access.
"So I came back in 1986, and they said it would be fine, except they had
put the tablets in vaults to keep them safe from bombardment during the
Iran-Iraq war," Stone recalled. "Now I'll never see them."
[...]
read the rest at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48178-2003Apr17.html
Agamemnon
IN HELL ALONG FOR HIS CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY WITH DONALD RUMSFELD,
CONDELISA RISE, COLIN POWEL, DICK CHANEY AND EVERY OTHER ZIONIST SAVAGE THAT
CONTROLS HIS FASCISTIC GENOCIDE REGIME INCLUDING ARIAL SHARON.
"Italo" <cuNOca...@home.nl> wrote in message
news:3EA01E01...@home.nl...
TsatskeMitGroysseTsitskes
Roger Pearse
> Were the individual tablets ever photographed?
Libraries try to prevent this, as a rule. If you go up to the British
Library and ask/offer to photograph a manuscript, you'll be refused
(I've tried). I've been trying recently to get a privately-owned UK
copy of a rare 1494 Tertullian edition photographed, and have had 3
years of bureaucratic refusals and obstruction (still haven't managed
it), even though no-one but me cares about it. They won't do it
themselves, they won't let me do it, and they won't get out of the
way. The most they will grudgingly do is charge me a lot of money to
have a professional make a photograph, provided I undertake to show it
to no-one -- yet I could make a copy in half an hour for nothing with
a digital camera, and I want it to appear online so people can use it.
I'm going to try again this week, tho, and reference the Iraq losses.
In general, 150 years after the invention of photography, this scandal
persists. There is no right of copying of these things, even though
they are supposedly public property, and whatever the theory, the
practise is that copying is verboten, or regarded as a privilege to be
sold for a high price. Our public libraries contain masses of
uncopied material, and their curators ensure this continues. The
British Library has a manuscript of Tertullian they acquired in the
mid 19th century. 150 years later, not a single photograph of any
portion of it has ever been taken -- yet they turned down my offer to
collaborate to fix this.
We've lost manuscripts continually throughout the 20th century, and
with them, knowledge. The fire at Turin in 1905, in Dresden in 1945
are examples. I have online a list of manuscripts of Orosius, which
includes several destroyed in France in WW2. The only manuscript of
the Letter of Diognetus was destroyed in the 1870 war.
The loss that angers me most is that a lost treatise by Theodore of
Mopsuestia was rediscovered in Syriac in 1905. It was never
photographed, and the only manuscript was destroyed in WW1. So it was
lost again, through the greed or stupidity of ... mostly likely some
petty nameless bureaucrat.
Pardon my rant, but this topic is one close to my heart. *Why* are
the officials allowed to prevent copying?
All the best,
Roger Pearse
The Tertullian Project
www.tertullian.org
tkavanagh
>
> "TsatskeMitGroysseTsitskes" <tsa...@nyc.rr.com> wrote in message news:<qZYna.15755$mC1.3...@twister.nyc.rr.com>...
> > Were the individual tablets ever photographed?
>
> Libraries try to prevent this, as a rule. If you go up to the British
> Library and ask/offer to photograph a manuscript, you'll be refused
> (I've tried).
<snip>
FWIW: The British Library provided me with a photograph of Bernardo
Miera y Pacheco's 1778 map of New Mexico for use in my book, _Comanche
Political History_ (1996, U Nebraska Press), for a modest fee.
tk
Bobby D. Bryant
> Pardon my rant, but this topic is one close to my heart. *Why* are
> the officials allowed to prevent copying?
There are some exceptions. At the _Program in Aegean Scripts and
Prehistory_ (here at UT) they are building a systematic photo archive of
every known Linear B text. (Possibly Linear A as well; not sure.)
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
Joe Bernstein
Bobby D. Bryant <bdbr...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Apr 2003 10:16:16 -0700, Roger Pearse wrote:
>
> > Pardon my rant, but this topic is one close to my heart. *Why* are
> > the officials allowed to prevent copying?
I couldn't speak to the particular officials of interest to you,
but the general reason copying can be forbidden is that copyright
is not the only factor. Nobody holds copyright in (for example)
a manuscript of Tertullian, but the owner of the physical copy has
rights too.
How this translates when publicly-owned libraries are the owners of
the physical copies? May I suggest that if your post-destruction
attempts are again refused, you try the standard way to deal with
obstructionist bureaucrats, namely complaining in the newspapers and
to your MP? See, the thing is, even if the bureaucrats respond by
insisting that amateurs shouldn't be allowed to mess with rare books,
they're in the spotlight, where they don't like to be, and if you
manage to make yourself look sweet and reasonable, then at least
you get to insist on their getting professionals in to do the job.
"This isn't about me, of course! This is about *someone* protecting
our Precious Intellectual and Religious Heritage!"
> There are some exceptions. At the _Program in Aegean Scripts and
> Prehistory_ (here at UT) they are building a systematic photo archive of
> every known Linear B text. (Possibly Linear A as well; not sure.)
This isn't at all unusual in the fields where everyone knows
perfectly well that what survives survives only by luck and chance.
I'm not sure of the details, but there's such an abundance of
projects to put cuneiform tablets online that a newspaper put out
by *high school students* here in Madison, Wisconsin where I live
recently ran an article listing half a dozen, I kid you not.
I know the papyrologists have been working for years on getting
every papyrus, period, online (though I'd bet there are particular
libraries holding out anyway...).
When you get to fields where survival is in manuscripts, and
there's some continuity of scholarly tradition, proprietary
databases seem to be more the norm: the Thesaurus Linguae
Graecae, apparently a more or less equivalent project for Chinese,
I dunno what-all else. The Arthur Voobus collection of microfilms
of Syriac manuscripts is the closest equivalent I can think of to the
online projects, in that it anyway isn't proprietary, but I have no
idea how the library that owns it handles requests for access.
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer and clerk j...@sfbooks.com
<http://these-survive.postilion.org/>
Neville Lindsay
"Roger Pearse" <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3a88eeea.0304...@posting.google.com...
They used to use the excuse that flash photography and laser copying fade
the original. Well, yes if you do it often enough. But with digital imagery
and a control on the frequency, there is no excuse for this continued
obstructiveness. It is reminiscent of the argument which goes on on
stabilisation of acid-rain affected stonework - decades of argument roll on
about irreversible preservation techniques being necessary, while the
irreversible reduction to pieces of stone meanwhile moves inexorably on.
Perhaps your plea on the Iraq example might help, but I wouldn't bet on it
unless you can bring political pressure to bear. Bureaucrats are the most
immovable of people. Their personal power and self-acclaim is their driving
force and, once they decline a permission, further approaches and effort to
reversal become a threat to their position, and switch a simple refusal into
entrenched opposition, regardless of the soundness of the argument.
NL
Ken Down
Lindsay" <nev...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> They used to use the excuse that flash photography and laser copying fade
> the original. Well, yes if you do it often enough.
If they took one photograph of the original and then made copies available
at a reasonable price, there would be no damage.
In any case, objects of stone or clay are not subject to light damage.
May I mention the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which allowed photography
(though no flash or tripod) when I first visited it, then suddenly changed
its mind and banned all photography. I presume someone informed the idiots
that fast film was now available and hand-held photography of their somewhat
gloomy interior was now possible.
However at least they are honest about the ban. In Egypt they will sell you
a photography permit - no flash or tripod, again - and then you get to see
the museum: so little lighting that you have difficulty reading the labels
attached to the exhibits.
Syrian museums ban all photography, the only reason why I wouldn't mind a
change of administration in that country.
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem bans all photography (though curiously the
Rockerfeller Museum does not). There are many reasons why I would like to
see a change of administration in Israel.
Jordan used to ban photography in the Amman museum, but last time I was
there they had changed their minds, for which I applaud them.
Ken Down
--
__ __ __ __ __
| \ | / __ / __ | |\ | / __ |__ All the latest archaeological news
|__/ | \__/ \__/ | | \| \__/ __| from the Middle East with David Down
================================= and "Digging Up The Past"
Web site: www.argonet.co.uk/education/diggings
e-mail: digg...@argonet.co.uk
Ken Down
roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
> Pardon my rant, but this topic is one close to my heart. *Why* are
> the officials allowed to prevent copying?
I agree with you entirely. I can see that a museum or library might not want
the general public flashing away with their Instamatics, but they have a
duty to make photographs available to anyone and at a reasonable price. The
only exception might be if some scholar is already working on a document; he
should then be given priority for a reasonable length of time.
Wherever possible, I disregard museum bans on photography. I don't sell my
photographs, I don't even publish or show most of them, but they are there
and will one day come in useful.
Roger Pearse
I have a file half an inch thick of excuses of one sort or another.
Mind you, there was some sort of logic to the refusal longer ago. To
get a decent photograph of a manuscript using film means lighting.
This means, in reality, some sort of book cradle to clamp the book
open, and fixed lighting. The former could easily damage the binding
in amateur hands, while the latter are hot. Hot lamps are not a good
thing to have in a confined space in a building stuffed with paper!
Fire is a real risk. It's not too unreasonable to forbid such risky
activity except by those under control (i.e. professionals). The
problem, of course, is that the end result is no photography. And
anyway, with the digital camera you can just take the snap in a couple
of seconds and get a perfectly readable thing, no hot lamps, no
book-cradles. But the libraries have not grasped this.
Also, fragile items do deteriorate when sudden changes in temperature
happen. I once photocopied a rare 1842 book (belonging to a library
which was closing down and so didn't care too much) which was in poor
condition, but had been little handled. By the time I was done, the
warmth of the copier had reduced the binding to little more than a
collection of leaves at one or two points (I offered to pay for
rebinding, I should add). However, the copy I have will have
children, as it will appear on the internet (and I sweated blood to
get access to a copy for 2 years), while that physical copy has
probably little future before it. So I don't beat my breast too
badly. But I recognise the issue.
> Perhaps your plea on the Iraq example might help, but I wouldn't bet on it
> unless you can bring political pressure to bear.
I agree. I have a plan to do this, but I haven't got around to it
yet. I'm a bit nervous about picking a fight with three powerful
institutions all at once, tho!
> Bureaucrats are the most
> immovable of people. Their personal power and self-acclaim is their driving
> force and, once they decline a permission, further approaches and effort to
> reversal become a threat to their position, and switch a simple refusal into
> entrenched opposition, regardless of the soundness of the argument.
I agree. I have some lovely examples on file. But...
Firstly, you can always write to their boss, the ultimate head of the
organisation. While the letter will probably be handed down to them
to deal with, their actions are visible at the top. One bunch I dealt
with employed a real sow, who wouldn't let me put something on the net
tout court. Eventually I wrote to said boss, who forwarded it down.
But she moved on the following year -- and her replacement was grilled
at interview about his attitude to digital library projects, to ensure
he was more positive. So although apparently I made no progress, the
obscurantism was noted, and in time something done about it. Few of
the top men *want* to look dummies.
Secondly, the b*gg*rs will move on. They have what they imagine are
their careers, and so you can always try it on again on their
replacement.
Thirdly, you can always try to get someone important to write on your
behalf to them. It makes them nervous.
It's obscene that I've wasted hours of my life trying to get some of
these people to do what we pay them to do. But determination will get
you everywhere. Remember the unjust judge in the NT. They may not
put stuff online because it is right, and they may not agree because
it is their job, but although they fear neither God nor man, they will
agree in the end just to get rid of you.
Wish I had a handy journalistic contact, tho.
Roger Pearse
> In article <3a88eeea.0304...@posting.google.com>,
> roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
>
> > Pardon my rant, but this topic is one close to my heart. *Why* are
> > the officials allowed to prevent copying?
>
> I agree with you entirely. I can see that a museum or library might not want
> the general public flashing away with their Instamatics, but they have a
> duty to make photographs available to anyone and at a reasonable price. The
> only exception might be if some scholar is already working on a document; he
> should then be given priority for a reasonable length of time.
Within reason, I agree. The balance is tilted too far at the moment,
I think.
> Wherever possible, I disregard museum bans on photography. I don't sell my
> photographs, I don't even publish or show most of them, but they are there
> and will one day come in useful.
Good on you. The thing is to get the things in existence.
BTW do remember that some of the minor officials do read usenet. I'm
being careful about names of people I still have hopes of
influencing...
Roger Pearse
> In article <nTpoa.2535$8K2....@news-server.bigpond.net.au>, "Neville
> Lindsay" <nev...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>
> > They used to use the excuse that flash photography and laser copying fade
> > the original. Well, yes if you do it often enough.
>
> If they took one photograph of the original and then made copies available
> at a reasonable price, there would be no damage.
You remind me of a trip to the Laurentian library in Florence. I was
there on a bus tour, and couldn't visit Florence without at least
seeing the Laurentian. They have the two Mss of Tacitus' Annals. It
occurred to me that any self-respecting library would be flogging
slides of the page which talks about the Christians to tourists at a
bean a copy, and I thought I'd go and see.
Of course *no-one* spoke English. And I don't speak much Italian.
(Luckily a English scholar was in reception and kindly helped me).
But it turned out that they did not. Incredible, even from the most
short-sighted point of view. It's cash, after all.
> In any case, objects of stone or clay are not subject to light damage.
>
> May I mention the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which allowed photography
> (though no flash or tripod) when I first visited it, then suddenly changed
> its mind and banned all photography. I presume someone informed the idiots
> that fast film was now available and hand-held photography of their somewhat
> gloomy interior was now possible.
<gnash> I really hate that sort of obscurantism.
> However at least they are honest about the ban. In Egypt they will sell you
> a photography permit - no flash or tripod, again - and then you get to see
> the museum: so little lighting that you have difficulty reading the labels
> attached to the exhibits.
There's a good story in Kent Weeks book, "The Lost Tomb", of his
efforts to do aerial photography of the Theban necropolis for the
Theban Mapping Project. Egyptian officials, for 'security' reasons,
decreed that all film must be handed to them, developed by the army,
and photos which didn't contain secure sites would be returned. So
they got up in their balloon, took the photos, and handed them over.
Months later they got back one grainy photograph, completely out of
focus and obviously misdeveloped. The rest had vanished.
In the end, they got smart and did another flight, hid the film, and
just handed over rolls of blank film. They never saw any of their
'official' photos again, but the real photos were saved.
It makes the point that what we're dealing with in our libraries is
third-world standards of officialdom -- pointless regulation, in which
the officials are strict in enforcing rules on others but lax in doing
their own duty.
> Syrian museums ban all photography, the only reason why I wouldn't mind a
> change of administration in that country.
Agreed. I'd love to go out there, tho, and perhaps Bashir will be
more liberal than old Assad was.
> The Israel Museum in Jerusalem bans all photography (though curiously the
> Rockerfeller Museum does not). There are many reasons why I would like to
> see a change of administration in Israel.
The Dead Sea Scrolls court case took place there, so plainly there is
dog-in-the-manger obscurantism there too.
> Jordan used to ban photography in the Amman museum, but last time I was
> there they had changed their minds, for which I applaud them.
At last some good news! Good on the Jordanians.
I liked Jordan when I went there to see Petra, Jerash. I'd love to go
again. But as I get older, I find I'm getting less tolerant of being
uncomfortable far from home. <sad>
Roger Pearse
> In article <pan.2003.04.19....@mail.utexas.edu>,
> Bobby D. Bryant <bdbr...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 19 Apr 2003 10:16:16 -0700, Roger Pearse wrote:
> >
> > > Pardon my rant, but this topic is one close to my heart. *Why* are
> > > the officials allowed to prevent copying?
>
> I couldn't speak to the particular officials of interest to you,
> but the general reason copying can be forbidden is that copyright
> is not the only factor. Nobody holds copyright in (for example)
> a manuscript of Tertullian, but the owner of the physical copy has
> rights too.
Not really. The creator of a photograph has the rights. This is why
the libraries insist that *they* take the photos, so that, by owning
the copyright in the photograph they can control who can see it, even
though the original is out of copyright. Sneaky, nasty, and an abuse
of the copyright principle, IMHO.
BTW, did you know that in one sense Anglo-Saxon England came into
existence as a result of a Dark Ages copyright dispute?
> How this translates when publicly-owned libraries are the owners of
> the physical copies? May I suggest that if your post-destruction
> attempts are again refused, you try the standard way to deal with
> obstructionist bureaucrats, namely complaining in the newspapers and
> to your MP? See, the thing is, even if the bureaucrats respond by
> insisting that amateurs shouldn't be allowed to mess with rare books,
> they're in the spotlight, where they don't like to be, and if you
> manage to make yourself look sweet and reasonable, then at least
> you get to insist on their getting professionals in to do the job.
> "This isn't about me, of course! This is about *someone* protecting
> our Precious Intellectual and Religious Heritage!"
I agree. I have some plans along these lines, and just haven't had
the time to do it. But someone needs to have a crack at this problem.
Roger Pearse
That sounds like a fine project, and I hope they don't encounter too
much opposition. That's what every library should be doing, or at
least facilitating if they can't do it themselves.
Roger Pearse
I think they've always done this. It's not too unreasonable to make a
modest charge here, IMHO, as there is money involved, however little,
and a commercial quality photograph is a desideratum. I'd be curious
to know how much they wanted, if only approximately, in this case.
My beef is that the practical effect of the mess of rules and
regulations is in general to stop things getting photographed when
there isn't money involved, and available to us all.
tkavanagh
>
> tkavanagh <tkav...@indiana.edu> wrote in message news:<3EA1BA22...@indiana.edu>...
> > Roger Pearse wrote:
> > >
> > > "TsatskeMitGroysseTsitskes" <tsa...@nyc.rr.com> wrote in message news:<qZYna.15755$mC1.3...@twister.nyc.rr.com>...
> > > > Were the individual tablets ever photographed?
> > >
> > > Libraries try to prevent this, as a rule. If you go up to the British
> > > Library and ask/offer to photograph a manuscript, you'll be refused
> > > (I've tried).
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > FWIW: The British Library provided me with a photograph of Bernardo
> > Miera y Pacheco's 1778 map of New Mexico for use in my book, _Comanche
> > Political History_ (1996, U Nebraska Press), for a modest fee.
>
> I think they've always done this. It's not too unreasonable to make a
> modest charge here, IMHO, as there is money involved, however little,
> and a commercial quality photograph is a desideratum. I'd be curious
> to know how much they wanted, if only approximately, in this case.
It was almost 10 years ago, but as I remember, it was about 25 dollars
and a copy of the book.
tk
Ken Down
roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
> I think they've always done this.
I cannot applaud the British Museum highly enough. They really do have the
idea of public service.
I remember wanting to photograph some casts in the Cambridge University
archaeology museum. The gormless youth on duty said that photography was
completely prohibited and then added, "No museums allow you to take pictures
of their exhibits".
I pointed out that the British Museum did, but he, with great politeness and
upper-class accent, insisted that I was wrong. The British Museum certainly
did not permit photography; how could it? Cambridge didn't, so the BM
couldn't.
He doesn't know how close he came to suffering physical violence.
Twit!
Ken Down
> In the end, they got smart and did another flight, hid the film, and
> just handed over rolls of blank film. They never saw any of their
> 'official' photos again, but the real photos were saved.
He he. It is useful when visiting museums to go in pairs. One has a very
obvious camera and ostentatiously raises it to his eyes. The attendant runs
and waves his arms, argues, forbids, prohibits, and meanwhile you, at the
other end of the room, are shooting away.
> Agreed. I'd love to go out there, tho, and perhaps Bashir will be
> more liberal than old Assad was.
I have high hopes for him. The atmosphere in Syria this time was very
different to previous visits and although there was still anti-Israeli
propaganda, it was more restrained and was matched by appeals for peace and
moderation. I just hope Bush leaves him alone.
> The Dead Sea Scrolls court case took place there, so plainly there is
> dog-in-the-manger obscurantism there too.
I just love the way the Israelis were outsmarted on that one.
> I liked Jordan when I went there to see Petra, Jerash. I'd love to go
> again. But as I get older, I find I'm getting less tolerant of being
> uncomfortable far from home. <sad>
In that case, come on the Diggings Tour. 5-star luxury all the way.
Neville Lindsay
> In article <3a88eeea.03042...@posting.google.com>,
> roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
>
> > In the end, they got smart and did another flight, hid the film, and
> > just handed over rolls of blank film. They never saw any of their
> > 'official' photos again, but the real photos were saved.
>
> He he. It is useful when visiting museums to go in pairs. One has a very
> obvious camera and ostentatiously raises it to his eyes. The attendant
runs
> and waves his arms, argues, forbids, prohibits, and meanwhile you, at the
> other end of the room, are shooting away.
Being a map freak, I tried a similar trick in the Berlin Museum with a 12th
C map, distracting the attendant while an accomplice took the photo. The
bloke had eyes in his arse - detected the flash in the next bay and we had
to flee. And unfortunately the map was glass covered, and the photo was
mostly reflection.
Now if they had photos on sale, I would willingly have parted with a few
bucks for a good quality image. They need to get some marketing consultants
to show them how to finance their collections, to everybody's benefit.
NL
Neville Lindsay
> "Neville Lindsay" <nev...@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
news:<nTpoa.2535$8K2....@news-server.bigpond.net.au>...
[----]
I spent a lot of time and energy and my entire lifetime supply of charm (no
doubt you have noticed) in establishing relations with a few organisations
where I obtained unfettered entry to special collections, and as a 'trustee'
had free run of the house.
Things changed. After arriving at one museum, rang the usual curator, and
got a cryptic 'it's changed - go to the research centre'. There a new bright
young female told me I had to write her a letter, she would write a covering
letter, and send it over to the images department, where a bright young
female who was the new supervisor of my usual contact would consider it and
write her a memo back, and she would write me a response telling me what I
could and couldn't do. Thus went three days of my four day research visit.
Now lest anyone thing I am misogynist, no that is not so. There were pelnty
of efficient and ultra-helpful female curators. However the bright new ones
had banished them to menial backroom tasks and set up a petty bureaucracy
which stifled any productive use of the collections under their control. I
live in fear of the disease spreading to the other half of the collections.
But it has already taken hold in a second place - a library where my carte
blanche to restricted collections has become invalid as a 'different system'
now applies.
Now if there were some good reason for eg tightening controls, there might
be some point to this. However it is just petty bureaucracy. My efforts with
friends and acquaintances on the boards and chief archivists and historians
seem to attenuate or even fizzle out on the way down the chain, so that any
return to sanity is in form and with reluctance tantamount to obstruction -
the normal by the rules approach is stiffened by pique at having been
circumvented. The sad thing is that I have tended to simply give related
projects a miss, and am being channelled/herded into other areas where life
is simpler. I guess they have won - well at least until I can regather the
urge, energy, fortitude and patience for another assault on the bastions of
bureaucracy, and get back to dealing directly with people who are interested
in their collections, and anxious to se them being made full use of.
NL
Dan Seur
dignified letters highlighting and questioning the new rules in terms of
hindering serious scholarship, and signed by reputable people, can and
often do move bureaucratic mountains. Bureaucracy is always afraid of
bright lights, and a call from a newspaper thinking about doing a
possibly less-than-laudatory story is nightmarish to all levels of
management.
Ken Down
Lindsay" <nev...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> Being a map freak, I tried a similar trick in the Berlin Museum with a
> 12th C map, distracting the attendant while an accomplice took the photo.
> The bloke had eyes in his arse - detected the flash in the next bay and we
> had to flee. And unfortunately the map was glass covered, and the photo
> was mostly reflection.
Don't use flash; it gives horrible reflections and is easily detectable.
Fast film and a wide lens are the solution. I have a f1.2 on my camera.
George Black
> In article <cq_oa.5911$8K2....@news-server.bigpond.net.au>, "Neville
> Lindsay" <nev...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>
>
>>Being a map freak, I tried a similar trick in the Berlin Museum with a
>>12th C map, distracting the attendant while an accomplice took the photo.
>>The bloke had eyes in his arse - detected the flash in the next bay and we
>>had to flee. And unfortunately the map was glass covered, and the photo
>>was mostly reflection.
>
>
> Don't use flash; it gives horrible reflections and is easily detectable.
> Fast film and a wide lens are the solution. I have a f1.2 on my camera.
>
> Ken Down
>
I have a number of photos that I took in the V&A, the BM and the
Museum of London. I used a tripod and an exposure of 1 second.
Fantastic detail and no bother from the staff.
Neville Lindsay
"George Black" <gbl...@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message
news:3EA5A3FB...@ihug.co.nz...
Thanks Ken and George for the tips.
NL
June R Harton
> Being a map freak, I tried a similar trick in the Berlin Museum with a
12th
> C map, distracting the attendant while an accomplice took the photo. The
> bloke had eyes in his arse - detected the flash
Typical, barbarian, Nevile! As for those that accomodate you they are
foolish.
> in the next bay and we had to flee.
You'll come to a bad end, Nevile, if you don't mend your ways!
Spirit of Truth
(using June's e-mail to communicate to you)!
Eric Stevens
wrote:
>In article <cq_oa.5911$8K2....@news-server.bigpond.net.au>, "Neville
>Lindsay" <nev...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>
>> Being a map freak, I tried a similar trick in the Berlin Museum with a
>> 12th C map, distracting the attendant while an accomplice took the photo.
>> The bloke had eyes in his arse - detected the flash in the next bay and we
>> had to flee. And unfortunately the map was glass covered, and the photo
>> was mostly reflection.
>
>Don't use flash; it gives horrible reflections and is easily detectable.
>Fast film and a wide lens are the solution. I have a f1.2 on my camera.
>
I have recently bought a Sony DSC 707 (since replaced by the slightly
upgraded Sony DSC 717) 5 Megapixel digital camera. I have the ability
to set the equivalent film speed to ASA 400. It has extraordinary
ability (night vision etc) to see in the dark and has a built in laser
projector to enable focusing in dim light. The camera has a large lens
barrel - see:
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start;sid=awCjIVrrXrijJmRNSMqpKhXnBnp1yXxlnYs=?CatalogCategoryID=iw4KC0%2eN5%2eIAAAD0ELwllbTD&Dept=dcc
and is easy to hold steady.
I have used Nikon 801s etc for years as part of my work and am fussy
about the technical standard of my photographs. I have found the Sony
is good as the Nikon for virtually everything I do. The only thing it
can't match is the 105mm Micro Nikor macro lense. I would expect that
the Sony would have a good chance of taking hand-held available-light
photographs in most museum comditions. Don't worry too much about
light-temperature colour correction. Its built into the camera.
Eric Stevens
news-surfer
> In article <3a88eeea.0304...@posting.google.com>,
> roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
>
> > Pardon my rant, but this topic is one close to my heart. *Why* are
> > the officials allowed to prevent copying?
>
> I agree with you entirely. I can see that a museum or library might not
want
> the general public flashing away with their Instamatics, but they have a
> duty to make photographs available to anyone and at a reasonable price.
The
> only exception might be if some scholar is already working on a document;
he
> should then be given priority for a reasonable length of time.
>
> Wherever possible, I disregard museum bans on photography. I don't sell my
> photographs, I don't even publish or show most of them, but they are there
> and will one day come in useful.
>
> Ken Down
>
that the curators look upon the objects under their control as their
personal fiefdom. Being a librarian must be one of the most boring jobs on
earth. Having the power to refuse you access to something under their
control must be one of the few perks of the job. After all it implies a
higher, more priviledged status.
That said, while refusing permission to make copies can be justified when
dealing with private collections, this should not be the case for public
ones. There should be a statutory obligation on public bodies to either make
copies themselves or allow others to do so of all rare documents. There can
be no excuse for not doing this. These copies should be made available to
the public at nominal cost. After all, if we are talking about a public
institution then it is owned by the public. In the case of bodies like the
British Library, we the tax-payers employ the staff.
One point that does strike me from reading through this debate and that is
how much "archaeology" there is still to be done on the great libraries of
the world. It seems ironic that dirt archaeologists spend time and fortunes
digging in the sands of Egypt and Iraq when there are libraries stuffed with
material that no-one has even looked at still less photographed. Of course
it's more romantic to stumble upon a library of cunieform tablets while
excavating an ancient city. However wouldn't it be just as useful to read
the tablets already known about and stored in the basement of some museum?
Adrian Gilbert.
Ken Down
wrote:
> I have a number of photos that I took in the V&A, the BM and the
> Museum of London. I used a tripod and an exposure of 1 second.
> Fantastic detail and no bother from the staff.
Incidentally, what do you and Neville plan to do with your photographs when
you pass to that great museum in the sky? It would be a shame for them to be
thrown out by uncaring relatives. At the very least offer them to your local
museum, but perhaps you could try something more central such as the main
museum in your capital city?
Ken Down
<eric.s...@sum.co.nz> wrote:
> I have recently bought a Sony DSC 707 (since replaced by the slightly
> upgraded Sony DSC 717) 5 Megapixel digital camera. I have the ability
> to set the equivalent film speed to ASA 400.
When you get up in the 5 mp range, the resolution is just about as good as
64ASA slide film. Further more, that resolution is maintained as low as the
camera can manage, so you get the same resolution at your notional 400 ASA
as you do at more normal speeds.
Brilliant.
Ken Down
<som...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> There should be a statutory obligation on public bodies to either
> make copies themselves or allow others to do so of all rare documents.
Write to your MP. I'm going to do so.
George Black
> In article <3EA5A3FB...@ihug.co.nz>, George Black <gbl...@ihug.co.nz>
> wrote:
>
>
>>I have a number of photos that I took in the V&A, the BM and the
>>Museum of London. I used a tripod and an exposure of 1 second.
>>Fantastic detail and no bother from the staff.
>
>
> Incidentally, what do you and Neville plan to do with your photographs when
> you pass to that great museum in the sky? It would be a shame for them to be
> thrown out by uncaring relatives. At the very least offer them to your local
> museum, but perhaps you could try something more central such as the main
> museum in your capital city?
>
I have been into the bowels of these 'caring' museums Ken.
I have seen great areas of archived 'local' photographs slowly
decaying because no-one has the time to prepare and present them..
At the moment I'm working on locating the various tramway systems in
New Zealand, the sites of and ships using the rivers of New Zealand
as the transport system... and the sites of the flax mills and
factories..
As a result I get to see lots of different local museums and
collections.. Some are far better than the big museums but most
suffer from a dearth of helpers..
There are many pamphlets from these collections (British Museum etc.)
Eric Stevens
wrote:
>In article <ue8cav0slamu5n3ij...@4ax.com>, Eric Stevens
><eric.s...@sum.co.nz> wrote:
>
>> I have recently bought a Sony DSC 707 (since replaced by the slightly
>> upgraded Sony DSC 717) 5 Megapixel digital camera. I have the ability
>> to set the equivalent film speed to ASA 400.
>
>When you get up in the 5 mp range, the resolution is just about as good as
>64ASA slide film. Further more, that resolution is maintained as low as the
>camera can manage, so you get the same resolution at your notional 400 ASA
>as you do at more normal speeds.
Most digital cameras start to show 'noise' in their image at maximum
sensitivity but reviews suggest that this is not the case with the
Sony. Certainly I have found no reason to complain about mine.
>
>Brilliant.
>
Most definitely brilliant. If you hadn't already guessed, I am most
favourably impressed. :-)
I hadn't mentioned but, notwithstanding the fact that I am loaded with
Nikon equipment, I rejected the Nikon digital equivalents, for the
superior low-light performance of the Sony. I haven't regretted it one
iota.
Eric Stevens
Joe Bernstein
Roger Pearse <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in message
> news:<b7t4ff$h8a$1...@reader1.panix.com>...
> > > On Sat, 19 Apr 2003 10:16:16 -0700, Roger Pearse wrote:
> > > > Pardon my rant, but this topic is one close to my heart. *Why* are
> > > > the officials allowed to prevent copying?
> > I couldn't speak to the particular officials of interest to you,
> > but the general reason copying can be forbidden is that copyright
> > is not the only factor. Nobody holds copyright in (for example)
> > a manuscript of Tertullian, but the owner of the physical copy has
> > rights too.
> Not really. The creator of a photograph has the rights. This is why
> the libraries insist that *they* take the photos, so that, by owning
> the copyright in the photograph they can control who can see it, even
> though the original is out of copyright. Sneaky, nasty, and an abuse
> of the copyright principle, IMHO.
The owner of the physical copy has *rights* too. Otherwise presumably
you could break into my house to photograph any rare books I had
inside it, no? Not all rights are copyrights.
This is why the issue of public ownership is relevant. If the
owner of the objects you want to photograph is private, you haven't
a leg to stand on. If the owner is the public, as in the case of
the British Museum, then you have some basis for objecting to not
getting to photograph what you own a piece of. Note that *I*, on
the other hand, would have no similar basis, nor would you if the
document in question were owned instead by the Library of Congress.
I note the extremely strong sentiments in favour of everyone being
allowed to photograph everything elsewhere in the thread. To be
honest, I don't know what I think about that. I was grateful that
the museums I visited while travelling a few years ago let me take
pictures, but I certainly wasn't insisting that they let me. It had
not previously occurred to me that there was a moral imperative to
allow photography at will. I do think, however, that if I were an
impoverished country, I might wish to control the use of whatever
cultural treasures I *did* have, so as to make my museums a bit
closer to self-supporting; how can I be sure that the American who
wants to take pictures isn't going to print greeting cards out of
them, safe a thousand miles or more away? I have a hard time seeing
this line of thinking as unreasonable, and it's obviously extensible
to most libraries and museums worldwide. The question is more whether
you can make the same sort of claim when it comes to something that's
*not* likely to be a significant cash cow for the institution in
question... whether because the thing itself is un-marketable, or
because the institution is very rich compared to the thing's
marketability. (I should think that at least the former case, and
probably also the latter, applied to the British Museum's manuscript
of Tertullian, meaning no offense to Tertullian or you...)
> BTW, did you know that in one sense Anglo-Saxon England came into
> existence as a result of a Dark Ages copyright dispute?
No. This leaves me very confused (and if I'd been getting enough
sleep lately I'd probably be intrigued too). What do you mean?
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer and clerk j...@sfbooks.com
<http://these-survive.postilion.org/>
Joe Bernstein
<som...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> One point that does strike me from reading through this debate and
> that is how much "archaeology" there is still to be done on the great
> libraries of the world. It seems ironic that dirt archaeologists spend
> time and fortunes digging in the sands of Egypt and Iraq when there are
> libraries stuffed with material that no-one has even looked at still
> less photographed. Of course it's more romantic to stumble upon a
> library of cunieform tablets while excavating an ancient city. However
> wouldn't it be just as useful to read the tablets already known about
> and stored in the basement of some museum?
Well, obviously. If someone had already read the Sippar library,
which was first dug up nearly twenty years ago, then it wouldn't
be remotely so painful contemplating its loss or destruction.
(Has anyone heard anything more about items actually lost or destroyed
versus items known to be safe, at the museum?)
The tragic flaw that forms the centre of all rot in archaeology is
precisely the failure to publish. Archaeology as a discipline appears
to be set up so as to discourage people from cleaning up after the
diggers by publishing the books the diggers never get around to;
presumably universities want to employ archaeologists whose salaries
will be paid by grants to go dig, rather than archaeologists whose
salaries the universities have to pay to publish someone else's
leftovers. At any rate, estimates for how much archaeology goes
unpublished have been made; I don't remember offhand, but I *think*
they range from 50% upwards in every estimate I've seen. Since
archaeological digging is every bit as destructive as tomb-robbers'
digging, this failure fundamentally undercuts archaeologists'
moral case against the tomb-robbers. (Mind, even if the archaeologists
published everything promptly, the tomb-robbers would carry on; it
would just be a lot easier to take the archaeologists' side without
qualms.)
Neville Lindsay
> In article <3EA5A3FB...@ihug.co.nz>, George Black <gbl...@ihug.co.nz>
> wrote:
>
> > I have a number of photos that I took in the V&A, the BM and the
> > Museum of London. I used a tripod and an exposure of 1 second.
> > Fantastic detail and no bother from the staff.
>
> Incidentally, what do you and Neville plan to do with your photographs
when
> you pass to that great museum in the sky? It would be a shame for them to
be
> thrown out by uncaring relatives. At the very least offer them to your
local
> museum, but perhaps you could try something more central such as the main
> museum in your capital city?
>
> Ken Down
I am constantly on the make directing antiquities, photos and memorabilia to
proper custodial institutions before people pop off, the rellies consign all
that old rubbish to the tip. Also, stuff I accumulate myself for projects or
publications, I find a good home for wnen I have finished with it.
There is an additional problem - I would like to see crucifixion introduced
as a punishment for people who don't write identifying details on the back
of all photographs. There are so many around which become worthless images
due to lack of identification. Any which I spot in collections which I can
identify, I surrepticiously write what I know about them on the back when no
one is looking, or correct misidentifications. Illegal under the rules of
most institutions, but when you do the correct procedural thing and advise
them when you hand them back in, you can see the glaze of uninterest come
over the eyes, and know that nothing will be done.
NL
Ken Down
wrote:
> At any rate, estimates for how much archaeology goes
> unpublished have been made; I don't remember offhand, but I *think*
> they range from 50% upwards in every estimate I've seen. Since
> archaeological digging is every bit as destructive as tomb-robbers'
> digging, this failure fundamentally undercuts archaeologists'
> moral case against the tomb-robbers.
Your criticism is both correct and thoroughly deserved. Archaeologists who
fail to publish are every bit as bad as tomb robbers.
Ken Down
wrote:
> I have been into the bowels of these 'caring' museums Ken.
> I have seen great areas of archived 'local' photographs slowly
> decaying because no-one has the time to prepare and present them.
I am sure that this is true. However what is the alternative? Passing your
hoard of tramway photographs on to nephew George, who has no interest
whatsoever in tramways, is certain to result in all your hard work and
knowledge being lost. At least with a museum the loss is only possible.
Another possibility would be a society with a similar interest. Is there a
Tramways Preservation Society in NZ?
Ken Down
wrote:
> I do think, however, that if I were an
> impoverished country, I might wish to control the use of whatever
> cultural treasures I *did* have, so as to make my museums a bit
> closer to self-supporting; how can I be sure that the American who
> wants to take pictures isn't going to print greeting cards out of
> them
One way of making money out of them is to sell photography permits. I have
no objection to paying a sum of money for the right to photograph, whether
in a museum, stately home, or cathedral.
Then you can insist that the photographs are not for commercial purposes
(and sell a higher priced permit for commercial use). My lectures in
archaeology are illustrated with photographs from museums and archaeological
sites, but as I get little more than petrol money out of the lectures, I do
not feel that I am violating anyone's copyrights.
A final step, and one which I believe is not implemented anywhere in the
world, is to take the name and address of anyone who buys a permit. Then, in
the event of a catastrophe, you can call upon the people for copies of their
photographs.
Finally, I believe that some American has copyrighted Tut's death mask - I
forget whether this was a deal with the Egyptians or just taking advantage
of America's rather stupid copyright laws. I therefore get a frisson of
pleasure out of using my photographs of Tut's death mask as often as
possible. I enjoy defrauding stupidity.
Ken Down
Lindsay" <nev...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> There is an additional problem - I would like to see crucifixion
> introduced as a punishment for people who don't write identifying details
> on the back of all photographs.
With added flogging for archaeologists who don't write reports of their
digs.
Eric Stevens
wrote:
>In article <DUQpa.9236$8K2....@news-server.bigpond.net.au>, "Neville
>Lindsay" <nev...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>
>> There is an additional problem - I would like to see crucifixion
>> introduced as a punishment for people who don't write identifying details
>> on the back of all photographs.
>
>With added flogging for archaeologists who don't write reports of their
>digs.
Would it not be more appropriate to bury them (alive) in their
unreported digs?
Eric Stevens
Roger Pearse
> The owner of the physical copy has *rights* too. Otherwise presumably
> you could break into my house to photograph any rare books I had
> inside it, no? Not all rights are copyrights.
If you mean moral rights, then that is a separate issue. The main
moral principle would be 'do as you would be done by', and we would
have to explore how it all balanced out.
Legally if I broke in to your house, any photographs I took would
certainly be my property, and I would own the copyright. [Excursus on
the Tony Martin burglary scandal omitted].
> [Museums] It had
> not previously occurred to me that there was a moral imperative to
> allow photography at will.
The context, of course, is that such institutions do not photograph
their collections, or make the images available, and so material is
lost. Ken made a good point that collaboration would solve this
problem.
> > BTW, did you know that in one sense Anglo-Saxon England came into
> > existence as a result of a Dark Ages copyright dispute?
>
> No. This leaves me very confused (and if I'd been getting enough
> sleep lately I'd probably be intrigued too). What do you mean?
There was an Irish prince called Columba who went to stay with a
neighbouring tribe. While there, he saw a Psalter Ms. owned by one of
the tribesmen and asked to make a copy of it. The request was
refused. Columba then made a copy surreptitiously. After so doing,
he made it known that he had done so. The owner then demanded that
the copy be handed over. The dispute was taken to the kinglet, who,
somewhat baffled but coming down on the home side, decreed that as a
calf belongs to a cow, so a copy belongs to the owner of the original.
Columba was annoyed, and did what every Irishman does in this
circumstance -- resorted to violence. He gathered his clansmen, and a
battle ensued. The lads were victorious, and Columba regained the
copy he had made.
But there was a sequel. After the funerals had taken place, and most
of the wounded had been bandaged up, his tribal elders came to
Columba. While indicating that they had no problem with backing their
boy, and indeed sor twas a privilege, they didn't want to see
themselves doing it again over some book or other, and they wondered
if he had considered the advantages of a long sea voyage. Say,
starting with the next tide.
Columba took the hint, sailed off to Scotland and established himself
on the island of Iona. His missionaries evangelised all that part of
Scotland and Northumbria, and by converting them to Christianity made
possible the synod of Whitby and so the unification of England. And
Columba became St. Columba. And the father of many books.
[Alright, I know it's a little indirect, but it *is* a link. And I
thought the connection apposite... :) ]
Roger Pearse
> A final step, and one which I believe is not implemented anywhere in the
> world, is to take the name and address of anyone who buys a permit. Then, in
> the event of a catastrophe, you can call upon the people for copies of their
> photographs.
This is a good suggestion. Further, I think that licenses to
photograph with a digital camera might include the requirement that a
copy of the photos be deposited with the library, and some kind of
release paperwork. This costs no-one anything, and allows any library
to build a digital library for nothing.
> Finally, I believe that some American has copyrighted Tut's death mask - I
> forget whether this was a deal with the Egyptians or just taking advantage
> of America's rather stupid copyright laws. I therefore get a frisson of
> pleasure out of using my photographs of Tut's death mask as often as
> possible. I enjoy defrauding stupidity.
I'm not surprised, I must say.
Roger Pearse
> Ken Down wrote:
> >
> > Fast film and a wide lens are the solution. I have a f1.2 on my camera.
> >
> Museum of London. I used a tripod and an exposure of 1 second.
> Fantastic detail and no bother from the staff.
Has anyone else experimented with digital cameras? One can manage
without lighting -- they seem to work in near darkness. I've started
using them for photographing books, although I need to get one with a
higher resolution. Not sure about lens quality either.
Roger Pearse
Roger Pearse
An interesting story, and one that parallels my own experiences.
I find that smaller archives are generally more helpful. They're
simply pleased to have a scholar (or even someone like me) come along.
I must mention Norwich Cathedral Library, who let me spend days
trying to work out how to photograph a 1545 edition. I had no idea,
as must have been obvious, but they just let me get on with it in a
bay in the library, tripod and useless lights and all, and in the end
I did manage to get something or other. I have the warmest affection
for the kind and helpful people there, who allowed an enthusiast to
learn. And I don't suppose anyone else had ever enquired about those
books. Sadly they're closed for a couple of years while building work
goes on, but I shall return as soon as they reopen. Good people.
The wear and tear on the charm and urge to live is palpable, and I
know what you mean. And those letters! I have a pile of them... such
a waste of time.
But we must fight. I had a success once. I went to photograph a book
at a county record office. When I arrived, I was told I'd be charged
$50 per half hour (I think this was the amount) to do so, and would
have to be supervised. Since this was *my* local county, I
complained, and got told how hard up they were, etc etc. Then, by
chance, I was in the local library when the relevant department head
was there and I went up and asked. She let slip that hardly anyone
paid, and they only made $1200 a year anyhow. So she agreed to look
at it again -- and then left the organisation without dealing with it!
In the end I wrote to various politicians, and the new boss agreed to
remove the charge (he had no vested interest, and it was clearly
kicking around). It took around 2 years, tho, and every letter from
everyone breathed disinterest. I think they just got fed up with
arguing.
Still, illigitimis non carborundum. (Don't let the bastards grind you
down).
Roger Pearse
> In article <b87s13$9c2$2...@reader1.panix.com>, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com>
> wrote:
>
> > At any rate, estimates for how much archaeology goes
> > unpublished have been made; I don't remember offhand, but I *think*
> > they range from 50% upwards in every estimate I've seen. Since
> > archaeological digging is every bit as destructive as tomb-robbers'
> > digging, this failure fundamentally undercuts archaeologists'
> > moral case against the tomb-robbers.
>
> Your criticism is both correct and thoroughly deserved. Archaeologists who
> fail to publish are every bit as bad as tomb robbers.
Agree totally.
Roger Pearse
The thing is to get multiple copies into existence. No one
institution is safe. Fire is the fate of all of them, in time. But
if enough copies exist, they have a much better chance. The only
certain way to ensure destruction is to prevent the making of copies.
This is where digital media can have a role to play. Once your photos
are on CDROM, you can make a thousand of them for peanuts.
Inger E Johansson
"Roger Pearse" <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> skrev i meddelandet
news:3a88eeea.03042...@posting.google.com...
Roger and Ken,
may I ask if this is a problem in your part of the world. I don't know how
it is today here, but I do know that when I in early 1990's looked for
excavation reports from major excavations in Östergötland from period before
1980 I had to contact RAÄ Riksantikvarieämbetet as well as relatives to
archaeologists to have some reports because some weren't even written on a
typewriter...... and reports could also in some cases be edited 5-10 years
after the excavation had ended.
Inger E
Joe Bernstein
Ken Down <digg...@argonet.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <b87rer$9c2$1...@reader1.panix.com>, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com>
> wrote:
> > I do think, however, that if I were an
> > impoverished country, I might wish to control the use of whatever
> > cultural treasures I *did* have, so as to make my museums a bit
> > closer to self-supporting; how can I be sure that the American who
> > wants to take pictures isn't going to print greeting cards out of
> > them
> One way of making money out of them is to sell photography permits. I have
> no objection to paying a sum of money for the right to photograph, whether
> in a museum, stately home, or cathedral.
Oh good. This is some distance away from the perfect-freedom-to-
photograph advocacy I thought I was seeing in this thread, which
was probably my misreading.
However, let me note something. Not everyone who goes to a museum,
let alone a library, longs to photograph things. I don't, normally;
my trip in 2000 was the first time I'd been east of Ohio, and I had
(and still have) no certainty that I'd ever get that way again.
In Alexander Stille's book a review of which I recently posted to
sha, there's a chapter about the Vatican Library, focusing on the
forced resignation six years ago of its longtime head. Stille links
this to business deals this guy had made, which amounted to granting
unlimited rights to commercial exploitation of the library's
'treasures' in various ways. (There was, and for all I know still is,
a master contractor, who doesn't actually have all rights not otherwise
assigned, but does get to negotiate the assignments of rights; and
then various assignees with unlimited rights in particular areas,
as in, company X can make Vatican Library kitchen towels, while
company Y can make Vatican Library greeting cards, like that.)
Now, suppose that at this moment the national museum in Damascus,
Syria had an unaccountable wish to build itself a bunker someplace,
quickly and quietly. Would it be better off selling photo permits in
a tourist-depleted environment, or would it be better off doing what
the Vatican Library did, even though the buyers would probably
recognise that it was desperate and beat its price down? Which would
get it the money quicker? Given the probable use of that bunker, and
the topic with which this thread opened, would anyone here actually
*object* to this museum getting its money as fast as possible?
Well, contracts vary widely, and it's perfectly possible that the
museum in Damascus would end up with a contract according to which
random photographers are verboten. I know which side of *that* one
I'd be on.
The Vatican is richer, but not infinitely wealthy. If any of the
Vatican Library's contracts bar photography, well, I dunno how I'd
feel about that. Apparently the contracts have been used to get
the library catalogued, to hire staff allowing its hours to be longer,
and like that; to the extent that this is so, again, this is no hard
choice.
> Then you can insist that the photographs are not for commercial
> purposes (and sell a higher priced permit for commercial use). My
> lectures in archaeology are illustrated with photographs from museums
> and archaeological sites, but as I get little more than petrol money
> out of the lectures, I do not feel that I am violating anyone's copyrights.
People may disagree interestingly. One of my first web pages came down
for good after an interviewer ranted at me because I had quoted from
an interview she'd done (though of course I'd quoted only the
interviewee, not the questions).
> A final step, and one which I believe is not implemented anywhere in
> the world, is to take the name and address of anyone who buys a permit.
> Then, in the event of a catastrophe, you can call upon the people for
> copies of their photographs.
There is an art museum in Flint, Michigan that has some surprisingly
good items and (at least in 2000) a remarkably talented curator.
When I asked to take pictures there - because I wanted to remember
a particularly stunning juxtaposition of pictures, in fact - I was
made to sign a form in which I gave my name and address, as well as
attesting to my non-commercial intent. (They didn't charge a fee,
but in the bit I've just quoted, that's not at issue.)
I don't know that they make a database of those forms, but what you
actually described, as opposed to the additional steps it would take
to make the use of it you suggest, is already implemented at a small
provincial American museum. I suspect if larger ones don't, it's
because they don't have a good setup for it, physically. (It's
easier to allow or ban photography altogether than to require the
security guards to check for a permit; permit handling would require
some sort of installation in the lobby, creating a possibly awkward
eddy in the always complex crowds that form there.) I also don't know
how extensively American museums in general are involved in documenting
their own collections. I actually worked once, for a few weeks, at
the Field Museum in Chicago, which was trying to catalogue and web
its photo collection; a very odd job, but anyway my only exposure to
this from the inside.
> Finally, I believe that some American has copyrighted Tut's death mask
> - I forget whether this was a deal with the Egyptians or just taking
> advantage of America's rather stupid copyright laws. I therefore get a
> frisson of pleasure out of using my photographs of Tut's death mask as
> often as possible. I enjoy defrauding stupidity.
I'd be interested to know whether it's copyright or some such deal as I
outlined above.
As far as I know, nothing in American copyright law has yet been
stupidified enough to enable this sort of thing. But I could be behind
the times. I could very easily see the Patent Office allowing me to
*patent* King Tut's death mask, and it's always been possible for the
trademark folks to allow someone to trademark what doesn't belong to
them; but for all that American copyright law has increasingly many
flaws, I don't quite see how someone can get copyright in a work made
by someone else thousands of years ago. So I think something must be
missing from this story. Are you sure it isn't something about rights
in the use of an image? This isn't copyright, but an extremely murky
form of intellectual property that is much more popular with those who
claim to have it than with anyone else; I haven't heard of its having
a name of its own yet.
Joe Bernstein
> Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in message
> news:<b87rer$9c2$1...@reader1.panix.com>...
> > In article <3a88eeea.03042...@posting.google.com>,
> > Roger Pearse <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > The owner of the physical copy has *rights* too. Otherwise presumably
> > you could break into my house to photograph any rare books I had
> > inside it, no? Not all rights are copyrights.
>
> If you mean moral rights, then that is a separate issue. The main
> moral principle would be 'do as you would be done by', and we would
> have to explore how it all balanced out.
>
> Legally if I broke in to your house, any photographs I took would
> certainly be my property, and I would own the copyright. [Excursus on
> the Tony Martin burglary scandal omitted].
I don't mean moral rights, I mean the right not to have my house broken
into. I had written that owners of physical copies had rights too,
and you had contradicted me. I generally find you to be a rational
person when you're not engaged in your tedious insult exchanges with
[someone else in this subthread], so I couldn't believe I'd heard you
correctly. I mean, does owning a manuscript deprive me of the right
to vote?
If photographs taken by burglars are the burglars' property *and*
intellectual property, the law is a good deal stranger than the bit
Ken Down quoted in the other followup to my post. So if you break
into my house and start photographing, and I bust your camera, you
have a legal claim against me? If you break into my house and start
slashing away with a machete, and I bust *that*, do you have a legal
claim against me? This is profoundly weird...
Obviously, here I'm sort of being goofy; burglary isn't what you're
talking about, right? But I think it's a legitimate reductio, and
I've been providing considerably less goofy versions of this reductio
elsewhere in this thread. My point is that while I don't make a
cult of the concept of property rights, I do have a hard time with
just setting them entirely aside Because My Cause Is Just, which not
only has a cultish history of its own that's really unpleasant, but
has *practical* bad consequences, that can be drawn out of this
specific case with great ease, too. So the question becomes not one
of absolutes, but of balancing goods and rights.
To what extent is America's relative lack of state support for
cultural institutions the issue here? I mean, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, say, is no government agency, and I don't consider
that I have a ghost of a property right in the Unicorn Tapestries
that the Met owns. So I consider it pure generosity on the Met's
part that they let me take pictures of those tapestries. Y'all in
Europe, maybe also down under, might have different milieux in which
cultural institutions are *normally* mainly state-supported? I
certainly don't have the same diffidence towards the resources of
the state university here in Wisconsin, for example.
> > > BTW, did you know that in one sense Anglo-Saxon England came into
> > > existence as a result of a Dark Ages copyright dispute?
> >
> > No. This leaves me very confused (and if I'd been getting enough
> > sleep lately I'd probably be intrigued too). What do you mean?
>
> There was an Irish prince called Columba who went to stay with a
> neighbouring tribe.
[etc.]
Thanks much. Amusing and an interesting take on the story (which
I'd heard before but not considered in this light).
I had imagined you meant that Anglo-Saxon England as a field of
study was a by-product of some scholarly tiff that revolved around
copyright.
Ken Down
<eric.s...@sum.co.nz> wrote:
> Would it not be more appropriate to bury them (alive) in their
> unreported digs?
No. It kills them too fast, with too little suffering.
Eric Stevens
wrote:
The best ones are very very good.
Eric Stevens
Roger Pearse
> "Roger Pearse" <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> skrev i meddelandet
> news:3a88eeea.03042...@posting.google.com...
> > Ken Down <digg...@argonet.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:<na.010dd54be8....@argonet.co.uk>...
> > > In article <b87s13$9c2$2...@reader1.panix.com>, Joe Bernstein
> <j...@sfbooks.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > At any rate, estimates for how much archaeology goes
> > > > unpublished have been made; I don't remember offhand, but I *think*
> > > > they range from 50% upwards in every estimate I've seen. Since
> > > > archaeological digging is every bit as destructive as tomb-robbers'
> > > > digging, this failure fundamentally undercuts archaeologists'
> > > > moral case against the tomb-robbers.
> > >
> > > Your criticism is both correct and thoroughly deserved. Archaeologists
> who
> > > fail to publish are every bit as bad as tomb robbers.
> >
> > Agree totally.
>
> may I ask if this is a problem in your part of the world. I don't know how
> it is today here, but I do know that when I in early 1990's looked for
> excavation reports from major excavations in Östergötland from period before
> 1980 I had to contact RAÄ Riksantikvarieämbetet as well as relatives to
> archaeologists to have some reports because some weren't even written on a
> typewriter...... and reports could also in some cases be edited 5-10 years
> after the excavation had ended.
Not sure how big a problem it is. Notoriously Evans didn't publish
loads of stuff from Knossos. I get the impression this is
commonplace.
Roger Pearse
> In article <3a88eeea.03042...@posting.google.com>,
> Roger Pearse <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in message
> > news:<b87rer$9c2$1...@reader1.panix.com>...
> > > In article <3a88eeea.03042...@posting.google.com>,
> > > Roger Pearse <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > > The owner of the physical copy has *rights* too. Otherwise presumably
> > > you could break into my house to photograph any rare books I had
> > > inside it, no? Not all rights are copyrights.
> >
> > If you mean moral rights, then that is a separate issue. The main
> > moral principle would be 'do as you would be done by', and we would
> > have to explore how it all balanced out.
> >
> > Legally if I broke in to your house, any photographs I took would
> > certainly be my property, and I would own the copyright. [Excursus on
> > the Tony Martin burglary scandal omitted].
>
> I don't mean moral rights, I mean the right not to have my house broken
> into.
Hey, I wasn't advocating this. I presumed it was a hypothetical
example.
> I had written that owners of physical copies had rights too,
> and you had contradicted me.
They do not acquire ownership of copies just by virtue of owing the
original. That, I am told, is the legal position.
> I generally find you to be a rational
> person when you're not engaged in your tedious insult exchanges with
> [someone else in this subthread], so I couldn't believe I'd heard you
> correctly. I mean, does owning a manuscript deprive me of the right
> to vote?
We must be at cross-purposes here, for I don't understand this.
> If photographs taken by burglars are the burglars' property *and*
> intellectual property, the law is a good deal stranger than the bit
> Ken Down quoted in the other followup to my post. So if you break
> into my house and start photographing, and I bust your camera, you
> have a legal claim against me? If you break into my house and start
> slashing away with a machete, and I bust *that*, do you have a legal
> claim against me? This is profoundly weird...
I agree. Evidently I should not have snipped the Tony Martin bit.
A few years back, a gang of professional Irish thieves surrounded a
remote lonely farmhouse in Norfolk, and then broke in. The house, as
they knew, was occupied by a single old man named Tony Martin, and
they expected no resistance. Martin however had a shotgun (few do),
and let fly at them. One was killed one stone dead and the rest fled.
The police were called. Martin was arrested and charged with murder,
and convicted of manslaughter, and is still in prison. The thieves
were all released, and their relatives have made repeated
death-threats to the papers whenever the question of Martin's release
came up. Currently he's being refused parole on the grounds that he
refuses to say he's sorry for defending himself.
It is also the law that if I break into your house for purposes of
crime, and injure myself in any way, you are liable.
Of course this may only be UK law.
> Obviously, here I'm sort of being goofy; burglary isn't what you're
> talking about, right? But I think it's a legitimate reductio, and
> I've been providing considerably less goofy versions of this reductio
> elsewhere in this thread. My point is that while I don't make a
> cult of the concept of property rights, I do have a hard time with
> just setting them entirely aside Because My Cause Is Just, which not
> only has a cultish history of its own that's really unpleasant, but
> has *practical* bad consequences, that can be drawn out of this
> specific case with great ease, too. So the question becomes not one
> of absolutes, but of balancing goods and rights.
I'm all in favour of property rights, since they are the basis for a
civilised society. However I am less clear that a dog in a manger is
a legitimate part of them.
Pardon me, I really do not have the time to lay out all the various
parts of the moral thing here at the moment.
> To what extent is America's relative lack of state support for
> cultural institutions the issue here? I mean, the Metropolitan
> Museum of Art, say, is no government agency, and I don't consider
> that I have a ghost of a property right in the Unicorn Tapestries
> that the Met owns. So I consider it pure generosity on the Met's
> part that they let me take pictures of those tapestries. Y'all in
> Europe, maybe also down under, might have different milieux in which
> cultural institutions are *normally* mainly state-supported?
Universally, or nearly so.
> I
> certainly don't have the same diffidence towards the resources of
> the state university here in Wisconsin, for example.
>
> > > > BTW, did you know that in one sense Anglo-Saxon England came into
> > > > existence as a result of a Dark Ages copyright dispute?
> > >
> > > No. This leaves me very confused (and if I'd been getting enough
> > > sleep lately I'd probably be intrigued too). What do you mean?
> >
> > There was an Irish prince called Columba who went to stay with a
> > neighbouring tribe.
>
> [etc.]
>
> Thanks much. Amusing and an interesting take on the story (which
> I'd heard before but not considered in this light).
Glad you liked it. It's all how you look at it, isn't it?
Cheers,
Roger Pearse
Ken Down
roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
> The dispute was taken to the kinglet, who,
> somewhat baffled but coming down on the home side, decreed that as a
> calf belongs to a cow, so a copy belongs to the owner of the original.
An amusing historical tale and well told.
Ken Down
> This is where digital media can have a role to play. Once your photos
> are on CDROM, you can make a thousand of them for peanuts.
Very true.
How about we all compile a CD or two of photographs we have taken in museums
and make them available at cost price? (The photos would have to be
accompanied by some sort of captions, of course.)
I'll start off with a CD I already have of photographs taken in Greece,
including the National Museum in Athens and the Olympia museum.
I want to emphasise that I will not make any money out of this. It will be
purely cost (25p for the CD) plus postage.
Ken Down
<inger_e....@telia.com> wrote:
> may I ask if this is a problem in your part of the world.
It's a problem everywhere, and due to two factors. First is human nature:
it's much more fun to be out in the field digging up something new than to
be sat in a gloomy office writing up technical data. Second is the fact that
there is plenty of funding for digging, very little for writing.
Ken Down
wrote:
> Oh good. This is some distance away from the perfect-freedom-to-
> photograph advocacy I thought I was seeing in this thread, which
> was probably my misreading.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit. Worcester Cathedral, for example,
charges 1.00ukp for a photography permit. That's fine by me. Someone else
mentioned a 50.00ukp per half hour charge, which is unacceptable.
> Would it be better off selling photo permits in
> a tourist-depleted environment, or would it be better off doing what
> the Vatican Library did
No one here is talking about the commercial exploitation of things. If I
wanted to stick my photographs of Tut's death mask on coffee mugs and make a
living out of them, I would expect to pay a proper sum for the use of that
image.
> Well, contracts vary widely, and it's perfectly possible that the
> museum in Damascus would end up with a contract according to which
> random photographers are verboten. I know which side of *that* one
> I'd be on.
I would be against it.
> I don't know that they make a database of those forms, but what you
> actually described, as opposed to the additional steps it would take
> to make the use of it you suggest, is already implemented at a small
> provincial American museum.
Good, though I suspect that it was not for the purposes I suggested.
Yuri Kuchinsky
...
: Columba took the hint, sailed off to Scotland and established himself
: on the island of Iona. His missionaries evangelised all that part of
: Scotland and Northumbria, and by converting them to Christianity made
: possible the synod of Whitby and so the unification of England. And
: Columba became St. Columba. And the father of many books.
Well, I guess this just shows how much Roger knows about British
history....
Hint: The main purpose of the synod of Whitby was actually to *suppress*
the legacy of Columba.
Because the Celtic Church, for which Columba was the main inspiration, was
very different from the Roman Catholic Church. The so-called synod of
Whitby really represented an attempt on the part of the Roman missionaries
to subdue Celtic Christianity. And it took them many centuries after
Whitby before they could accomplish that.
Yours,
Yuri.
Baqqesh shalom veradphehu -- Seek peace and pursue it (Psalm 34:15)
Yuri Kuchinsky -- http://www.trends.ca/~yuku -- Toronto
Roger Pearse
> > One way of making money out of them is to sell photography permits. I have
> > no objection to paying a sum of money for the right to photograph, whether
> > in a museum, stately home, or cathedral.
>
> Oh good. This is some distance away from the perfect-freedom-to-
> photograph advocacy I thought I was seeing in this thread, which
> was probably my misreading.
You seem to have some personal interest here -- at least, I can't make
sense of this one otherwise. Why would anyone object to things
getting photographed? Am I right?
What I ask myself is what is the priority here -- conservation and
dissemination of rare or unique material, or making money and control
and politics? Most of these institutions are funded to do the former,
and fail to do it. Why do we pay good money to have stuff locked
away?
As for a charge to photograph, it depends how much it is. I've seen
such charges effectively amounting to prohibition -- a lose-lose
situation where the collection makes no money, because no-one will
pay, and so nothing is photographed, while the visitor can't
photograph the collection, because the charges are actually in
practise prohibitive, whatever the theory.
Do we want stuff to perish, or not? If not, we must do something
about the effective ban on photographing stuff. The libraries and
museums *will not* photograph the things. They just won't do it. So
how does it get done?
> In Alexander Stille's book a review of which I recently posted to
> sha, there's a chapter about the Vatican Library, focusing on the
> forced resignation six years ago of its longtime head. Stille links
> this to business deals this guy had made, which amounted to granting
> unlimited rights to commercial exploitation of the library's
> 'treasures' in various ways. ...
> Now, suppose that at this moment the national museum in Damascus,
> Syria had an unaccountable wish to build itself a bunker someplace,
> quickly and quietly. Would it be better off selling photo permits in
> a tourist-depleted environment, or would it be better off doing what
> the Vatican Library did, even though the buyers would probably
> recognise that it was desperate and beat its price down? Which would
> get it the money quicker? Given the probable use of that bunker, and
> the topic with which this thread opened, would anyone here actually
> *object* to this museum getting its money as fast as possible?
'Fraid I don't understand the point at issue here -- sorry.
> Well, contracts vary widely, and it's perfectly possible that the
> museum in Damascus would end up with a contract according to which
> random photographers are verboten.
... and one where the collection was not in fact photographed by the
monopolist.
> I know which side of *that* one
> I'd be on.
Glad to hear it.
> The Vatican is richer, but not infinitely wealthy. If any of the
> Vatican Library's contracts bar photography, well, I dunno how I'd
> feel about that.
I don't know that their *contracts* do. But I don't suppose for 5
minutes if I turned up with a camera that I would be allowed to
photograph. At least, I would be *amazed* if it were so.
In the 19th century, the library wouldn't even allow its readers to
see the catalogue.
> Apparently the contracts have been used to get
> the library catalogued, to hire staff allowing its hours to be longer,
> and like that; to the extent that this is so, again, this is no hard
> choice.
But again, the majority of the library's holdings remain
unphotographed.
You see, I don't care *who* does it, so long as it is done.
Consider the British Library deal with a Japanese institution to
photograph Gutenberg's bible. Now this latter is a good thing, and
fleecing Japanese banks is not necessarily an evil. But they managed
to spend some huge sum -- 10m GBP? -- on it. They did *two* books --
about 2 * 800 pages? That works out at around 5000 GBP a page!
Sheesh. How will the rest of their holdings ever get done? Imagine
how many books could be done for nothing, if they didn't ban their
users photographing things?
I do *not* want to spend my days photographing things -- I have other
things to do. But I am sick of material being lost because of petty
bureaucracy. Surely that is something we can all agree with? There
is an obverse to this, which means that the idea could go too far.
But at the moment, the problem is that nothing much is being recorded
and even less put online.
Searles O'Dubhain
"Yuri Kuchinsky" <yu...@clio.trends.ca> wrote in message
news:4wzqa.795$Kp3.88...@news.nnrp.ca...
> In soc.history.ancient Roger Pearse <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> ...
>
> : Columba took the hint, sailed off to Scotland and established
himself
> : on the island of Iona. His missionaries evangelised all that part
of
> : Scotland and Northumbria, and by converting them to Christianity
made
> : possible the synod of Whitby and so the unification of England. And
> : Columba became St. Columba. And the father of many books.
>
> Well, I guess this just shows how much Roger knows about British
> history....
>
> Hint: The main purpose of the synod of Whitby was actually to
*suppress*
> the legacy of Columba.
>
> Because the Celtic Church, for which Columba was the main inspiration,
was
> very different from the Roman Catholic Church. The so-called synod of
> Whitby really represented an attempt on the part of the Roman
missionaries
> to subdue Celtic Christianity. And it took them many centuries after
> Whitby before they could accomplish that.
>
> Yours,
>
> Yuri.
>
The central question that could not be opposed (supposedly) by the Irish
monks and abbots was whether the teachings of Columba (Columcille)
should have precedence over the teachings of Peter an apostle of Christ
(especially regarding setting the date for Easter). Here it is according
to Bede, The Venerable: The Synod of Whitby, 664 AD from
http://www.britannia.com/history/docs/whitby.html:
And though that Columba of yours (and, I may say, ours also, if he was
Christ's servant) was a holy man and powerful in miracles, yet should he
be preferred before the most blessed prince of the apostles, to whom our
Lord said, 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church;
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give up
to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven'?"
When Wilfrid had spoken thus, the king said, "Is it true, Colman, that
these words were spoken to Peter by our Lord?" He answered, "It is true,
O king!" Then said he, "Can you show any such power given to your
Columba?" Colman answered, " None." Then added the king, " Do both of
you agree that these words were principally directed to Peter, and that
the keys of heaven were given to him by our Lord?' They both answered, ,
We do." , Then the king concluded "And I also say unto you, that he is
the doorkeeper, whorl (sic) I will not contradict, but will, as far as I
know and am able in all things obey his decrees, lest when I come to the
gate of the kingdom of heaven there should be none to open them he being
my adversary who is proved to have the keys." The king having said this,
all present, both great and small gave their assent and, renouncing the
more imperfect institution, resolved to conform to that which they found
to be better.
*** end of quoted materials ***
This is indeed one of the points in the history of Christianity in the
British Isles where the influence of Rome was said to have overcome the
native traditions. It primarily concerned the setting of the date for
the feast of Easter though it also had to do with dress, tonsure, ritual
peculiarities and who was in authority. As with all conquests, history
was written by the victors and is not exactly "as we've been told it
was" which is itself a quote from one of Columba's monks by the name of
Odran. :-) Following this and the eventual Norman conquest of Britain
and then parts of Ireland, the churches and Bishopric system of
Christianity came to replace the more Celtic version which centered
around monasteries and abbeys.
Searles
Inger E Johansson
"Ken Down" <digg...@argonet.co.uk> skrev i meddelandet
news:na.540ee94be9....@argonet.co.uk...
> In article <l0kqa.3083$mU6....@newsb.telia.net>, "Inger E Johansson"
> <inger_e....@telia.com> wrote:
>
> > may I ask if this is a problem in your part of the world.
>
> It's a problem everywhere, and due to two factors. First is human nature:
> it's much more fun to be out in the field digging up something new than to
> be sat in a gloomy office writing up technical data. Second is the fact
that
> there is plenty of funding for digging, very little for writing.
>
> Ken Down
Ken,
I see the problem, but at least we who are inside EU should benifite because
if it hasn't been changed there are money to apply for for the
administrative work in a project and if all the other costs are found
elsewhere it's possible to make a digging project an EU project to get to
know more about our past. This means that the administrative costs up to 50%
of the total cost might be had from EU if the project apply....
Inger E
Roger Pearse
>
> ...
>
> : Columba took the hint, sailed off to Scotland and established himself
> : on the island of Iona. His missionaries evangelised all that part of
> : Scotland and Northumbria, and by converting them to Christianity made
> : possible the synod of Whitby and so the unification of England. And
> : Columba became St. Columba. And the father of many books.
>
> Well, I guess this just shows how much Roger knows about British
> history....
Mmm. I think it does. <smile>
> Hint: The main purpose of the synod of Whitby was actually to *suppress*
> the legacy of Columba.
<smile> I can see the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede smiling at me
from the shelves of my bookcase, and St. Adomnan's "Life of St.
Columba" on the next shelf... Old friends, the first two. I even
live within a few miles of Sutton Hoo.
I'm not sure why you imagined that I didn't know all this, but I did,
and this is why I mentioned the Synod of Whitby. All of Britain was
re-Christianized, and Columba achieved what Rome never had, the
conversion of all the North. Meanwhile Augustine and his lads were
doing the South. The Synod of Whitby then involved the agreement on a
single form of this, based on Rome, which created an ecclesiastical
unity -- the precursor, surely, of political unity.
> Because the Celtic Church, for which Columba was the main inspiration, was
> very different from the Roman Catholic Church.
If you say so. I rather doubt that Columba would have, tho.
> The so-called synod of Whitby
Why 'so-called'? It was a synod, and it happened at Whitby.
> really represented an attempt on the part of the Roman missionaries
> to subdue Celtic Christianity. And it took them many centuries after
> Whitby before they could accomplish that.
I think there is a large component of modern myth-making going on
here.
Roger Pearse
> In article <3a88eeea.03042...@posting.google.com>,
> roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
>
> > This is where digital media can have a role to play. Once your photos
> > are on CDROM, you can make a thousand of them for peanuts.
>
> Very true.
>
> How about we all compile a CD or two of photographs we have taken in museums
> and make them available at cost price? (The photos would have to be
> accompanied by some sort of captions, of course.)
>
> I'll start off with a CD I already have of photographs taken in Greece,
> including the National Museum in Athens and the Olympia museum.
>
> I want to emphasise that I will not make any money out of this. It will be
> purely cost (25p for the CD) plus postage.
It's a kind offer -- thank you Ken. However...
I think I'd want to be sure of the legalities. Selling CD's, no
matter how little the price, is the sort of thing that would excite
interest from lawyers. Freely available is one thing -- when money
changes hands it is quite another. I think this needs more thought.
All I have is some pictures of early Tertullian editions -- a complete
1545 edition on disk, plus assorted snaps of pages from others.
Probably not of interest to anyone, but I'm sure I own the copyright
and would be glad to make them available to anyone.
Roger Pearse
Any suggestions? I'm thinking of getting a new one. I have a promise
of access to photograph to a Tertullian manuscript (in semi-private
hands, naturally) and want to do it before a change of staff occurs.
Roger Pearse
Roger Pearse
> In article <3a88eeea.03042...@posting.google.com>,
> roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
>
> > The dispute was taken to the kinglet, who,
> > somewhat baffled but coming down on the home side, decreed that as a
> > calf belongs to a cow, so a copy belongs to the owner of the original.
>
> An amusing historical tale and well told.
Thank you. I don't actually recall where I read it, but perhaps in
'Scribes and Scholars' (Reynolds & Wilson).
news-surfer
> In article <b8cp5f$12t$1...@reader1.panix.com>, Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> No one here is talking about the commercial exploitation of things. If I
> wanted to stick my photographs of Tut's death mask on coffee mugs and make
a
> living out of them, I would expect to pay a proper sum for the use of that
> image.
>
his for all eternity. The a couple of tramps (Howard Carter and Lord
Carnavon) looted his grave. The mask was ripped from his corpse and put on
display in Cairo by authorities who were aiding and abetting grave-robbery.
You come and take a picture of said mask. Why should you have to pay the
museum officials anything for this priviledge.? They are, after all, simply
displaying stolen goods. If anyone deserves to be paid it is surely the
estate of King Tut!
Adrian Gilbert.
Eric Stevens
wrote:
>In article <l0kqa.3083$mU6....@newsb.telia.net>, "Inger E Johansson"
><inger_e....@telia.com> wrote:
>
>> may I ask if this is a problem in your part of the world.
>
>It's a problem everywhere, and due to two factors. First is human nature:
>it's much more fun to be out in the field digging up something new than to
>be sat in a gloomy office writing up technical data. Second is the fact that
>there is plenty of funding for digging, very little for writing.
It is bizarre that the digging should be funded while the reporting is
not. Is it that so little money is allocated that archaeologists spend
it all on digging? For my part, I would not (again) fund anyone who
failed to report on previous work. Its better to leave things in the
ground.
Eric Stevens
Inger E Johansson
"Roger Pearse" <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> skrev i meddelandet
news:3a88eeea.03042...@posting.google.com...
Yuri,
I second Roger. Due to St. Colomba being a descendant to Niall, who actually
came from Ranriki later on called Viken before his family moved to the
island north of Scotland, I have studied every document I have been able to
lay my hand on. Not only the ones mentioned above but also Colomba's own
writing and some annals rarely mentioned. One I had the University Library
in Linköping to send a recuest abroad for and that one was among those that
had to be in a safe when I didn't look at it.
Inger E
JMB
> In article <l0kqa.3083$mU6....@newsb.telia.net>, "Inger E Johansson"
> <inger_e....@telia.com> wrote:
>
> > may I ask if this is a problem in your part of the world.
>
> It's a problem everywhere, and due to two factors. First is human nature:
> it's much more fun to be out in the field digging up something new than to
> be sat in a gloomy office writing up technical data. Second is the fact
that
> there is plenty of funding for digging, very little for writing.
In Ireland, it is a legal requirement to issue a preliminary report within 4
weeks, and a full report within 12 months. If you fail to do this, you will
not be allowed to do any further digs, and will probably be fined. AFAIK,
Greece now has fairly strict reporting details as well. The only problem in
Ireland is knowing where to look for the report, but they are there once you
look in the right place.
Joe Bernstein
Ken Down <digg...@argonet.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <b8cp5f$12t$1...@reader1.panix.com>, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com>
> wrote:
> > Well, contracts vary widely, and it's perfectly possible that the
> > museum in Damascus would end up with a contract according to which
> > random photographers are verboten. I know which side of *that* one
> > I'd be on.
>
> I would be against it.
So let's be clear here. The national museum in Damascus, I'm
hypothesising, has decided to build a safe place to store their
treasures, so that in the event of a breakdown of civil order they
will not face the same fate as the museum in Baghdad *just did*. In
order to pay for this safe place, I'm hypothesising, they will go to
the quickest available source of cash, some sort of exclusive
licensing deal with some sort of marketer. And finally I'm
hypothesising that for whatever reason - adequate cash, Damascus's
known hard straits, incompetent negotiators - the final contract
says the museum may not permit amateur photography.
You would object to the museum signing that contract, and prefer
that it continue to subject its holdings to what is now patently
an unacceptable level of risk, because that way the holdings would
have a *better* chance of being preserved? What, exactly, am I
missing in your argument?
Jacques Guy
Let museums make copies of their scrolls, clay tablets,
artworks, and so on. Let them keep them. And sell the
originals to the highest bidders.
(I did tell you it was an outrageous suggestion, didn't
I? Perhaps I should have called it a Modest Proposal)
Eric Stevens
wrote:
>Eric Stevens <eric.s...@sum.co.nz> wrote in message news:<l4nkavk6pq60jbtpt...@4ax.com>...
>> On 25 Apr 2003 14:55:39 -0700, roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse)
>> wrote:
>>
>> >George Black <gbl...@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message news:<3EA5A3FB...@ihug.co.nz>...
>> >> Ken Down wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> > Don't use flash; it gives horrible reflections and is easily detectable.
>> >> > Fast film and a wide lens are the solution. I have a f1.2 on my camera.
>> >> >
>> >> I have a number of photos that I took in the V&A, the BM and the
>> >> Museum of London. I used a tripod and an exposure of 1 second.
>> >> Fantastic detail and no bother from the staff.
>> >
>> >Has anyone else experimented with digital cameras? One can manage
>> >without lighting -- they seem to work in near darkness. I've started
>> >using them for photographing books, although I need to get one with a
>> >higher resolution. Not sure about lens quality either.
>>
>> The best ones are very very good.
>
>Any suggestions? I'm thinking of getting a new one. I have a promise
>of access to photograph to a Tertullian manuscript (in semi-private
>hands, naturally) and want to do it before a change of staff occurs.
>
I can't tell you the best camera for you but I can tell you what I
believe to be the best site for digital camera reviews:
The camera I eventually chose for its low-light performance is the
Sony DSC-F707. Its successor is reviewed on the home page above. So
too a **very** many other cameras if you start to look. All very
thorough.
I must say I'm extraordinarly pleased with my purchase. It generally
matches the quality of anything I can do with my Nikon 801s. Mind you,
I have an Epson 1290 printer and Corel Photo Paint software, all of
which helps.
Eric Stevens
Joe Bernstein
> Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in message
> news:<b8cp5f$12t$1...@reader1.panix.com>...
> > Oh good. This is some distance away from the perfect-freedom-to-
> > photograph advocacy I thought I was seeing in this thread, which
> > was probably my misreading.
> You seem to have some personal interest here -- at least, I can't make
> sense of this one otherwise. Why would anyone object to things
> getting photographed? Am I right?
Right about my having a personal interest? Um, no, not in any sense
I can think of. My current job is a temp job, working at a company
whose ethics are pervasively wrong, and will end within weeks; the
company does have an impressive art collection, but none of that
art is old enough to be on-topic here, and anyway I have no interest
in whether people take pictures of it or not. (I *like* very little
of said impressive art, see.)
What I'm objecting to is this sense of entitlement. In this post you
seem to be saying that the present owners of these materials, or at
least their duly appointed agents, have failed at their jobs, so it's
better to let whoever wishes to act, act. This at least recognises
that *in principle* the owners or agents ought to have priority.
Not every post in this thread has even admitted that. And quite
frankly, if "things getting photographed" means a Perfect Right to
require that anyone preserve anything, or else get out of the way,
then I *do* object. It so happens that I don't delete my e-mail,
by and large, but I'm damned if I want keeping every piece of spam
that comes my way to be a legal obligation. Don't you see that if
you once admit that there are limits on your claim, then it becomes
a matter of negotiating those limits? While if you don't, then
most people should be arrested for putting locks on their doors.
(Although it would also, of course, be illegal to take the locks
*off*, at least without first photographing them for posterity.)
> What I ask myself is what is the priority here -- conservation and
> dissemination of rare or unique material, or making money and control
> and politics? Most of these institutions are funded to do the former,
> and fail to do it. Why do we pay good money to have stuff locked
> away?
To the extent that you're talking about stuff that you *do* pay good
money for, it's your business. To the extent that you're talking
about violating whatever restrictions museums in Egypt or Syria
want to impose, or about coming here to America and telling the
Oriental Institute it's not doing its job fast enough so it should
open its basements to you, well then frankly I think you'd better
have a *much* stronger case to make.
"I can take better care of this treasure than you can, so you should
let me {have it | borrow it | photograph it}." At the moment, I'm
sure the curators of Syriac manuscripts at the aforementioned
British Museum are feeling pretty damned good that those manuscripts
were, by dint of a previous generation's use of the above line,
*not* burnt in Mosul or Baghdad. But as has been pointed out in
some of these threads, such gloating would have been hollow indeed
in the aftermath of the bombing and looting of Berlin.
Meanwhile, many of these institutions are *not* adequately funded.
The art museum at the university a half-mile from my present home
apparently has room to show only about 1% of its collection. This is
prima facie evidence of inadequate funding, isn't it, now? Maybe
things in Europe are entirely different, but I'd be willing to bet
significant money that museums in Syria don't have the best
circumstances, and as I already indicated, the Vatican Library had to
find a way to pay for its *own* catalogues. The Arthur Voobus
collection I've mentioned before, fruit of a previous generation's
"you should let me photograph it" work, has been struggling along for
*decades* now inadequately catalogued, although in that case it's
probably partly from a shortage of competent workers in Syriac, and not
just from lack of money.
> Do we want stuff to perish, or not? If not, we must do something
> about the effective ban on photographing stuff. The libraries and
> museums *will not* photograph the things. They just won't do it. So
> how does it get done?
I'm not objecting to its getting done. I'm objecting to sweeping
generalisations that have a "come the revolution" feel. Come the
revolution, will the Field Museum, that once did employ me to help
catalogue and Web its photos, share the same fate as these obstreperous
national libraries in Europe?
I really think, though, that those who want to preserve the past can
pick better fights than to vituperate *librarians* and *curators*, of
all people. Immense amounts of stuff are out there waiting to be
webbed that we *don't* need any special permission about. No librarian
has come after me for putting <Les Actes des martyres d'Orient> online,
and I bet your far more copious activity also hasn't been opposed, am
I right? But if, as I fully expect, the drive to extend copyright for
longer and longer terms eventually results in a thoughtless elimination
of the public domain, then all such sites will be shut down. Copyright
is a *much* better fight to be fighting. (And of course efforts to
limit the insane expansions copyright has been undergoing have the side
benefit that they undercut, eventually, the arguments you don't like
librarians and curators to make.)
Actually webbing stuff is another good thing to do. Here, at least,
I can't fault you personally, but I note other people in this thread
who seem to be arguing not that there should be unrestricted access
for purposes of propagation, but just that there should be unrestricted
access period.
What we're talking about here, of course, is not spam e-mail, or door
locks. We're talking about cuneiform tablets that are *none* of them
younger than nineteen hundred years; about manuscripts at least
several centuries old; about stuff that's already demonstrated that
it can survive for a while. Something no photographs known to me have
done. I'd rather be working to make really sure that the local library
or museum had a good plan for what to do in the event of disaster. Or
working to implement something like Ken Down's database of known
photographs idea. Rather than sneaking pictures of this item or that
while the guard's back is turned, and then not knowing what will
become of the resulting photos when I die.
> > In Alexander Stille's book a review of which I recently posted to
> > sha, there's a chapter about the Vatican Library, focusing on the
> > forced resignation six years ago of its longtime head. Stille links
> > this to business deals this guy had made, which amounted to granting
> > unlimited rights to commercial exploitation of the library's
> > 'treasures' in various ways. ...
> > Now, suppose that at this moment the national museum in Damascus,
> > Syria had an unaccountable wish to build itself a bunker someplace,
> > quickly and quietly. Would it be better off selling photo permits in
> > a tourist-depleted environment, or would it be better off doing what
> > the Vatican Library did, even though the buyers would probably
> > recognise that it was desperate and beat its price down? Which would
> > get it the money quicker? Given the probable use of that bunker, and
> > the topic with which this thread opened, would anyone here actually
> > *object* to this museum getting its money as fast as possible?
>
> 'Fraid I don't understand the point at issue here -- sorry.
How should the museum in Damascus, given what recently happened to
its sister institution in Baghdad, get money to construct a hiding
place for its treasures? Selling photo permits, as Ken Down has
suggested, is at best a long-term solution. Selling marketing
contracts, which might demand such exclusivity as to require barring
photography, is much quicker. What's wrong with speed?
> > Well, contracts vary widely, and it's perfectly possible that the
> > museum in Damascus would end up with a contract according to which
> > random photographers are verboten.
>
> ... and one where the collection was not in fact photographed by the
> monopolist.
Yep. I'm aware of that. But where its physical survival would be
more probable. So that when holograms can be taken cheaply and
without physical damage to the object, a century from now, people
aren't saying "Damn! I wish the treasures of Damascus had
survived until now!"
> > The Vatican is richer, but not infinitely wealthy. If any of the
> > Vatican Library's contracts bar photography, well, I dunno how I'd
> > feel about that.
>
> I don't know that their *contracts* do. But I don't suppose for 5
> minutes if I turned up with a camera that I would be allowed to
> photograph. At least, I would be *amazed* if it were so.
>
> In the 19th century, the library wouldn't even allow its readers to
> see the catalogue.
Stille actually talks about this.
As I understand it, the catalogues were handwritten until fairly
recently, and the catalogues of manuscripts still largely are.
The money from those exclusive contracts went to build the computer
catalogue, among other things.
> I do *not* want to spend my days photographing things -- I have other
> things to do. But I am sick of material being lost because of petty
> bureaucracy. Surely that is something we can all agree with? There
> is an obverse to this, which means that the idea could go too far.
> But at the moment, the problem is that nothing much is being recorded
> and even less put online.
Here, I disagree with nothing.
Ken Down
roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
> Of course this may only be UK law.
And it is law for which I, for one, am thoroughly ashamed. Tony Martin
should have been given a medal, not sent to prison.
Joe Bernstein
here. After that this becomes a normal post.
In article <3a88eeea.0304...@posting.google.com>,
Roger Pearse <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
I wrote:
> > > > > > Nobody holds copyright on (for example) a manuscript of
> > > > > > Tertullian, but the owner of the physical copy has
> > > > > > rights too.
You began your reply, in a post attributed but not actually quoted
above:
> > > > > Not really.
You went on to talk about copyright, and since I had explicitly
excluded copyright from my own comments, I could only conclude
that your "Not really" was meant to deny all rights other than
copyright to the owners of physical objects, in answer to my
assertion, before you went back to copyright that I hadn't been
talking about. This is so bizarre a position that I've been trying
to sort out what you meant by it ever since, and not, to tell the
truth, getting any clarity.
So the "Not really" is what my comments, first in the long long
quote that I opened this post with, came in answer to, and the
rest proceeds from there.
[legal horror stories]
> Of course this may only be UK law.
Um, it isn't, not entirely. There have undoubtedly been times when
robbers have successfully sued over (say) damage to their clothes in
making getaways, in American courts. But there haven't been many,
and it's not how things normally work here.
> > Obviously, here I'm sort of being goofy; burglary isn't what you're
> > talking about, right? But I think it's a legitimate reductio, and
> > I've been providing considerably less goofy versions of this reductio
> > elsewhere in this thread. My point is that while I don't make a
> > cult of the concept of property rights, I do have a hard time with
> > just setting them entirely aside Because My Cause Is Just, which not
> > only has a cultish history of its own that's really unpleasant, but
> > has *practical* bad consequences, that can be drawn out of this
> > specific case with great ease, too. So the question becomes not one
> > of absolutes, but of balancing goods and rights.
>
> I'm all in favour of property rights, since they are the basis for a
> civilised society. However I am less clear that a dog in a manger is
> a legitimate part of them.
>
> Pardon me, I really do not have the time to lay out all the various
> parts of the moral thing here at the moment.
I'm guessing that what you mean by "dog in a manger" (a phrase I've
never been able to make sense of) is someone who insists on a particular
right but makes no use of it?
And that the specific moral problem with that here is that precious
objects are at risk because their custodians neglect them but forbid
others who might wish to ameliorate this neglect from doing anything.
Fundamentally, what I've been trying to say in this spate of posts is
that I expect it's more complicated than that; that I'd be very
surprised if the restrictions people are complaining about were *all*
nothing but bureaucrats being bureaucrats because being a bureaucrat
is more fun than being a human. I can think of *many* reasons a
particular request to photograph might be turned down. Maybe a
monopoly contract that's allowing the institution to do all kinds
of useful things requires it. Maybe the photographer has damaging
lights. Maybe the object in question has been reserved by a
particular scholar, and the institution is respecting that (this
is one reason why texts often take a long time to get proper editions,
as we all know from the extreme case of the Dead Sea Scrolls).
Maybe the institution was handed forty boxes, told "Somewhere in there
is everything we dug up at Tel Sloth; surely you have the staff to
sort through it all and work it up for publication while I go on
to dig up Tel Glory?" - and the forty boxes have sat over in the
corner ever since, until one bright day a guy with a camera shows
up and insists that the institution provide a full catalogue, so
he can locate the exact items he wants to take a picture of.
I'm *not* denying that there are bureaucrats who enforce rules for no
good reason. Frankly, I did this just the other day myself. Allow
me to digress into this, because I think it shows how this sort of
thing can work. At my current temp job, one of the things I do is
handle a particular kind of accounting transaction that anyone in
any of three departments can request. In two of these departments,
the policy is that the departmental supervisor signs off on the
request before it comes to me. I don't know why this is so; frankly,
from what I've seen of said supervisors' work, I'd bet this is a mere
formality. But anyway, several weeks into the job, I got a request
from someone in the third department, and there was no supervisory
approval. So I went back to the person who submitted the request
and said I was used to finding approvals there, why wasn't there one
on this one? She was most incensed, and insisted that no supervisor
had ever signed off on this kind of request. As it turns out, in
*her* department, that was true. You know what resulted? *My* boss,
in the accounting department, now provides the supervisory approval
for the requests from this third department. That way all requests
have supervisory approval, but nobody in department #3 does any more
work than they used to.
In other words, rules for no good reason are *not* limited to the
public sector, let alone to employees of cultural institutions. I
expect that at some point my boss's boss will find out about this,
make a fuss, and it will change. In the meantime, nothing. In
the case of libraries and museums: I have no argument with boss's
bosses, in this case the public, making a fuss and getting changes.
I do have an argument with its being done on an ad hoc basis, just
to show that rules aren't for obeying, because someone who turns
an effort to overturn a no-photography rule into a mere game of
outwit the security guard is *not* in a position to know whether
there's some good reason for the rule, *nor* in a position to turn
said photograph into a useful tool for propagation or preservation.
If you want a photography of something badly enough to try to outwit
a security guard, well, that's for your conscience, and it's not as
though I'd never broken a rule in my life myself. But I certainly
don't see that you get to cloak that desire in high-minded rhetoric
about the service of posterity.
In my first post in this subthread, I suggested you take the case
of this Tertullian manuscript to the parliament and to the press.
I stand by those suggestions. I think through open discussion of
the matter there's the best chance of progress. And such discussion
is not well served by just assuming, at getgo, that the other side
can have nothing defensible or true to say.
Jacques Guy
> Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in message news:<b8cpv8$19t$1...@reader1.panix.com>...
> > If photographs taken by burglars are the burglars' property *and*
> > intellectual property, the law is a good deal stranger than the bit
> > Ken Down quoted in the other followup to my post. So if you break
> > into my house and start photographing, and I bust your camera, you
> > have a legal claim against me?
As far as I know, yes.
> > If you break into my house and start
> > slashing away with a machete, and I bust *that*, do you have a legal
> > claim against me?
No. You would have acted in self-defense. Same as if the
burglar swings his camera at you, and you bust it: self-defense,
since he used the camera as a weapon.
> > This is profoundly weird...
Laws are known to be asses.
> A few years back, a gang of professional Irish thieves surrounded a
> remote lonely farmhouse in Norfolk, and then broke in.
> [snip] Martin was arrested and charged with murder,
> and convicted of manslaughter, and is still in prison.
A piece of advice I received from a retired policeman (Australian).
You have two shots. Use the first to kill (aim at the chest). The
second into the ceiling. Tell it to us the other way around:
first shot into the ceiling (warning shot), second when the
burglar was undeterred, and you panicked.
> It is also the law that if I break into your house for purposes of
> crime, and injure myself in any way, you are liable.
> Of course this may only be UK law.
French law too. I am not sure about Australian law.
> I'm all in favour of property rights, since they are the basis for a
> civilised society. However I am less clear that a dog in a manger is
> a legitimate part of them.
This goes farther. I am thinking of a particular set of books which
I reviewed for the Times Higher Education Supplement last year.
Unlike other books I reviewed, I was not told how much they cost.
When my review was published, I saw that those four volumes, totalling
a tad under 2000 pages, cost seven hundred pounds. In my view, this
amounts to a denial of knowledge, masquerading under the flimsy excuse
of
"copyright". I am glad, however, to have seen the same set offered
second-hand for US$141.93 at www.abebooks.com. The binding _is_ good,
so that is probably a fair price.
Joe Bernstein
<digg...@argonet.co.uk> wrote:
> It's a problem everywhere, and due to two factors. First is human
> nature: it's much more fun to be out in the field digging up something
> new than to be sat in a gloomy office writing up technical data. Second
> is the fact that there is plenty of funding for digging, very little
> for writing.
To some extent this is exacerbated by preliminary publication.
I mean, if at Tel Glory you find the oldest known example of
pot-licking, say, then you can build a career of comfortable
travel lecturing, and occasional papers, and so on, on that;
those who are interested in pot-licking have what they wanted;
and so forth. It's only a relatively diffuse public that would
want to know about the beads, say, that are totally uninteresting
in their own right and only useful in the context of the beads
from ten other neighbouring sites - five of which are themselves
unpublished.
Ironically, preliminary publication is also the only salvation
there is to this whole sordid tale. I don't know if this is still
true, but at least for several decades, the Archaeological Survey of
India published an annual review in which all activities it permitted
*had* to be reported. Many but *not* all archaeologists took
advantage of the free publication to provide short but detailed
accounts of the year's finds; for some sites, four pages a year
for six years is as close to a site report as there ever was, but
it's a whole lot better than a hole in the head. And even for the
rest, represented only by a perfunctory paragraph each year, at
least the paragraph named who did it and from what institution, so
you wouldn't have to go to the ASI bureaucrats to find out where to
ask after the excavated finds. I gather that for a sizable number
of countries further west there's something similar in one way or
another (for example there's at least one journal that surveys
archaeology in Greece every year, and archaeology in Turkey and
various other countries less often). I'd be very surprised if China
had nothing similar too.
(The US definitely doesn't. A whole lot of salvage archaeology
gets done here, and at least as of the last time I heard, which
was admittedly close to twenty years ago, the publication rate
of that was appallingly bad. And there's no national and not
as far as I know any statewide or regional equivalents of the ASI's
annual catalogue.)
Getting back to Why Not Published, I suppose at some level the
fact of preliminary publication, in one form or another, is even
a legitimate sort of scholarly answer. To the extent that one mainly
wants Answers, after all, full publication of Nowheropolis isn't
crucial, as long as the pots that demonstrate the existence of
trade with Someplacestad see the light of day; after that, from
that point of view, the logical thing to do *is* to dig on the
trade route between the two sites, not to keep worrying the bones
of Nowheropolis.
There are also practical considerations. It's *expensive* to
publish stuff fully, or what passes for fully. (I have never
seen a site report that contained a picture of every pot, or
anything resembling a clear statistical breakdown of what kinds
of what were found where; has anyone else?) And this results
in copies being expensive too, which limits sales and makes the
whole routine look kind of pointless; I mean, if "publication"
means the book gets into two national libraries and your own local
stacks, you still haven't provided access. As I understand it, there
are efforts underway to ameliorate this problem by streamlining
the core publication - I don't know, maybe thirty pages or a
hundred, but basically do a short old-fashioned site report,
preferably in a journal, and then put the statistical analyses, the
full-blown technical reports, the complete set of photos, whatever,
onto the Web, or onto a CD-ROM, or something like that. I've only
seen brief references to this, so I'm not really clear on just *how*
it ameliorates the problem of expense, but I do know that that's
much of what it's meant to address. It also helps ameliorate another
practical difficulty - now that so many digs are interdisciplinary,
a proper full publication could be held up for years waiting for
Mortimer Fripp to finish his technical analysis of the excavated
toy rhinoceroses, while a modular publication could just shrug that
bit off for later.
Ken Down
roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
> Consider the British Library deal with a Japanese institution to
> photograph Gutenberg's bible. Now this latter is a good thing, and
> fleecing Japanese banks is not necessarily an evil. But they managed
> to spend some huge sum -- 10m GBP? -- on it. They did *two* books --
> about 2 * 800 pages? That works out at around 5000 GBP a page!
> Sheesh.
It does depend on what the Nips wanted to do with the photographs. If they
wanted to produce reproduction Gutenbergs for sale to the general public,
then I suppose ten million is not excessive. If, on the other hand, they
merely wanted to make a copy available to Japanese scholars, then it is
criminal.
Mind you, you are not clear on whether they the British Museum charged ten
million or the Japs spent ten million. The two are not the same.
For example, a few years back someone wanted to photograph the Book of Kells
(I think it was) in Dublin. That was all very well and the library had no
great objection, but the problem was that the binding is so stiff with age
that the book could not be opened more than an inch or two - say ten degrees
maximum. The bods who wanted to do the photography had to go away and design
a special lens (I seem to recall that it had a prism on the front of it or
something like that) which would allow them to photograph two pages at once,
with the camera only inches away from a folio-size book that was open by ten
degrees. That took a lot of money!
Ken Down
--
__ __ __ __ __
| \ | / __ / __ | |\ | / __ |__ All the latest archaeological news
|__/ | \__/ \__/ | | \| \__/ __| from the Middle East with David Down
================================= and "Digging Up The Past"
Web site: www.diggingsonline.com
e-mail: digg...@argonet.co.uk
Ken Down
> Thank you. I don't actually recall where I read it, but perhaps in
> 'Scribes and Scholars' (Reynolds & Wilson).
Ah. I thought you made the slight alteration for dramatic effect. In fact
Columba set off on his missionary journeys, not under pressure from the
leaders of his tribe but because he felt guilty over all the deaths he had
caused. His aim was to stay away until he had converted one heathen for each
of the Christians he had killed in his battle over the book.
Ken Down
--
__ __ __ __ __
| \ | / __ / __ | |\ | / __ |__ All the latest archaeological news
|__/ | \__/ \__/ | | \| \__/ __| from the Middle East with David Down
================================= and "Digging Up The Past"
Web site: www.diggingsonline.com
e-mail: digg...@argonet.co.uk
Ken Down
<inger_e....@telia.com> wrote:
> I see the problem, but at least we who are inside EU should benifite
> because if it hasn't been changed there are money to apply for for the
> administrative work in a project
First of all you would have to persuade a bureaucrat that producing a report
was "administration". Then you would have to overcome the problem of
obtaining funding for past digs which were not EU funded.
Ken Down
--
__ __ __ __ __
| \ | / __ / __ | |\ | / __ |__ All the latest archaeological news
|__/ | \__/ \__/ | | \| \__/ __| from the Middle East with David Down
================================= and "Digging Up The Past"
Web site: www.diggingsonline.com
e-mail: digg...@argonet.co.uk
Ken Down
<som...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> Why? The face mask was buried with King Tut on the basis that it would be
> his for all eternity. The a couple of tramps (Howard Carter and Lord
> Carnavon) looted his grave. The mask was ripped from his corpse and put on
> display in Cairo by authorities who were aiding and abetting
> grave-robbery. You come and take a picture of said mask. Why should you
> have to pay the museum officials anything for this priviledge.? They are,
> after all, simply displaying stolen goods. If anyone deserves to be paid
> it is surely the estate of King Tut!
I suppose they could claim to be the executors of Tut's estate. After all,
they are the present government of Egypt and therefore - however unworthy -
the heirs of the pharaohs.
Ken Down
--
__ __ __ __ __
| \ | / __ / __ | |\ | / __ |__ All the latest archaeological news
|__/ | \__/ \__/ | | \| \__/ __| from the Middle East with David Down
================================= and "Digging Up The Past"
Web site: www.diggingsonline.com
e-mail: digg...@argonet.co.uk
Ken Down
wrote:
> So let's be clear here. The national museum in Damascus, I'm
> hypothesising, has decided to build a safe place to store their
> treasures, so that in the event of a breakdown of civil order they
> will not face the same fate as the museum in Baghdad *just did*. In
> order to pay for this safe place, I'm hypothesising, they will go to
> the quickest available source of cash, some sort of exclusive
> licensing deal with some sort of marketer. And finally I'm
> hypothesising that for whatever reason - adequate cash, Damascus's
> known hard straits, incompetent negotiators - the final contract
> says the museum may not permit amateur photography.
> You would object to the museum signing that contract, and prefer
> that it continue to subject its holdings to what is now patently
> an unacceptable level of risk, because that way the holdings would
> have a *better* chance of being preserved? What, exactly, am I
> missing in your argument?
If the commercial marketeer were to publicise *all* the museum's holdings, I
suppose that I would grudgingly acquiesce. However take the Cairo museum as
an example: Tut's mask, great. Everyone wants a picture of that. A couple of
statues of Mycerinus and his goddesses, yes, they are sexy too. However what
about Tut's bows? What about the leather underpants - I'll bet you've never
even heard of them? What about my favourite, the statue of a Roman in
complete pharaonic pose - hands by sides, one leg advanced, Egyptian
headdress - and a neat little curly beard?
Suppose the Cairo Museum were to be destroyed; from your hypothetical
commercial bod they will be able to reconstruct Tut's mask no problems. But
what about the leather underpants? I don't suppose there are many coffee
mugs around with those on them - but they could reconstruct them from my
photograph.
The reason for allowing everyone to take pictures is illustrated by my
exchanges with Roger Pearse. If I came across a copy of Tertullian, I might
- just possibly might - take a general shot of it, but that would be all,
because Tertullian leaves me more or less cold. Roger, however, has detailed
pics of every page, whereas I'll bet that his collection of Egyptian
underpants and Cycladic idols is pretty sparse indeed.
Ken Down
--
__ __ __ __ __
| \ | / __ / __ | |\ | / __ |__ All the latest archaeological news
|__/ | \__/ \__/ | | \| \__/ __| from the Middle East with David Down
================================= and "Digging Up The Past"
Web site: www.diggingsonline.com
e-mail: digg...@argonet.co.uk
Ken Down
wrote:
> Meanwhile, many of these institutions are *not* adequately funded.
> The art museum at the university a half-mile from my present home
> apparently has room to show only about 1% of its collection. This is
> prima facie evidence of inadequate funding, isn't it, now?
A very good and thoughtful post, Joe, and I absolutely endorse your call for
things to be published on the web. The only caveat I would make is that web
pages, by their very nature, can disappear in seconds whereas my Kodachrome
slides can, with proper care, last indefinitely.
As for the point I have quoted above, no, it is not evidence of lack of
funding, nor even necessarily of lack of space. It may simply be lack of
interest. I have been in the storerooms of the British Museum and much of
the stuff there is simply not of interest to the general public. Joe Public
may well queue up to see the Elgin Marbles, they might even spare a passing
glance at one or two tablets from Nineveh or Ur, but fill a room with clay
tablets and although you will delight the heart of every Sumerian scholar,
Joe Public will glance in the door and hurry on to other things.
Ken Down
<eric.s...@sum.co.nz> wrote:
> It is bizarre that the digging should be funded while the reporting is
> not. Is it that so little money is allocated that archaeologists spend
> it all on digging? For my part, I would not (again) fund anyone who
> failed to report on previous work. Its better to leave things in the
> ground.
I agree - but digging is glamorous. Technical reports are not.
Ken Down
> It's a kind offer -- thank you Ken. However...
> I think I'd want to be sure of the legalities. Selling CD's, no
> matter how little the price, is the sort of thing that would excite
> interest from lawyers. Freely available is one thing -- when money
> changes hands it is quite another. I think this needs more thought.
I am sure it is breaking copyright, a risk I am prepared to take, but I
believe that the fact that you don't make money out of it is some defence.
> All I have is some pictures of early Tertullian editions -- a complete
> 1545 edition on disk, plus assorted snaps of pages from others.
> Probably not of interest to anyone, but I'm sure I own the copyright
> and would be glad to make them available to anyone.
Well, it doesn't interest me - my Greek is extremely rusty - but it may well
interest others.
Ken Down
> In Ireland, it is a legal requirement to issue a preliminary report within
> 4 weeks, and a full report within 12 months. If you fail to do this, you
> will not be allowed to do any further digs, and will probably be fined.
What a splendid idea! Good for the Irish.
> AFAIK, Greece now has fairly strict reporting details as well.
Yes, people are becoming aware of the importance of reports, for which we
can be grateful.
Ken Down
--
__ __ __ __ __
| \ | / __ / __ | |\ | / __ |__ All the latest archaeological news
|__/ | \__/ \__/ | | \| \__/ __| from the Middle East with David Down
================================= and "Digging Up The Past"
Web site: www.diggingsonline.com
e-mail: digg...@argonet.co.uk
Ken Down
<jg...@alphalink.com.au> wrote:
> Let museums make copies of their scrolls, clay tablets,
> artworks, and so on. Let them keep them. And sell the
> originals to the highest bidders.
I can see nothing wrong with the suggestion.
Ken Down
> <smile> I can see the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede smiling at me
> from the shelves of my bookcase, and St. Adomnan's "Life of St.
> Columba" on the next shelf... Old friends, the first two. I even
> live within a few miles of Sutton Hoo.
Hi, Roger. I visited Sutton Hoo a couple of months ago. You can see what I
made of the new museum on http://www.nwtv.co.uk (look under Travel/England
and your county)
You will need RealPlayer.
news-surfer
Ken? Why should you wish to reconstruct them? Would they fit? We should be
told!
Adrian Gilbert.
Eric Stevens
wrote:
>In article <b8fr5p$s13$1...@reader1.panix.com>, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com>
>wrote:
>
>> Meanwhile, many of these institutions are *not* adequately funded.
>> The art museum at the university a half-mile from my present home
>> apparently has room to show only about 1% of its collection. This is
>> prima facie evidence of inadequate funding, isn't it, now?
>
>A very good and thoughtful post, Joe, and I absolutely endorse your call for
>things to be published on the web. The only caveat I would make is that web
>pages, by their very nature, can disappear in seconds whereas my Kodachrome
>slides can, with proper care, last indefinitely.
Umm - I'm afraid its not that simple. See
http://www.fotoinfo.com/info/technicalinfo/stability.html
>
>As for the point I have quoted above, no, it is not evidence of lack of
>funding, nor even necessarily of lack of space. It may simply be lack of
>interest. I have been in the storerooms of the British Museum and much of
>the stuff there is simply not of interest to the general public. Joe Public
>may well queue up to see the Elgin Marbles, they might even spare a passing
>glance at one or two tablets from Nineveh or Ur, but fill a room with clay
>tablets and although you will delight the heart of every Sumerian scholar,
>Joe Public will glance in the door and hurry on to other things.
>
>Ken Down
Eric Stevens
tkavanagh
>
> In article <b8fr5p$s13$1...@reader1.panix.com>, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Meanwhile, many of these institutions are *not* adequately funded.
> > The art museum at the university a half-mile from my present home
> > apparently has room to show only about 1% of its collection. This is
> > prima facie evidence of inadequate funding, isn't it, now?
>
> A very good and thoughtful post, Joe, and I absolutely endorse your call for
> things to be published on the web. The only caveat I would make is that web
> pages, by their very nature, can disappear in seconds whereas my Kodachrome
> slides can, with proper care, last indefinitely.
>
> As for the point I have quoted above, no, it is not evidence of lack of
> funding, nor even necessarily of lack of space. It may simply be lack of
> interest.
<snip>
I think I can add a bit of professional expertise here: It *is* a lack
of exhibit space. Most art museums exhibit items with a lot of
"respectful space" around them: they are individual items presented
without context. With only a given amount of exhibit space, there are
only so many artifacts that can be on exhibit at any one time.
At the same time, even my museum --we pride ourselves for having
"context-rich" exhibits--can only put up so many artifacts. We have abut
20,000 artifacts in the collections, but only 200-300 are on exhibit at
any one time.
We do try to make up for that situation by providing access to the
collections storage area for organized tours, and for just about anybody
who asks.
Indeed, that was how I got into the museum business. In about 1963, at
age 14, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., I was in the Boy Scouts,
with a budding interest in American Indians. One summer day, I went down
to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum to look at the Indian
exhibits.
I was trying to see how the clothes on the mannequin of Kicking Bear
(yes, it's still up) were made, pressing my face against the glass for a
better look.
A guard came up, and said, "What are you doing, kid?"
I said, "I'm trying to see how that was made."
He said, "Come with me, kid."
I thought he would arrest me, or throw me out, or something bad.
No. He called the Curator of Ethnology, Bill Sturtevant (yes, he is
still there, too.)
He and I spent the afternoon in the attic looking at all kinds of neat
stuff.
Before they moved it all to Silver Hill, MD, a couple of years ago, I
spent many an hour in that wonderful, asbestos and other poison laden
repository of neat stuff (that is, indeed, the technical term used by
old museum hands).
tk
Thomas Kavanagh, PhD
Curator of Collections
Mathers Museum
Indiana University
Eric Stevens
wrote:
>Ken Down wrote:
>>
>> In article <b8fr5p$s13$1...@reader1.panix.com>, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Meanwhile, many of these institutions are *not* adequately funded.
>> > The art museum at the university a half-mile from my present home
>> > apparently has room to show only about 1% of its collection. This is
>> > prima facie evidence of inadequate funding, isn't it, now?
>>
>> A very good and thoughtful post, Joe, and I absolutely endorse your call for
>> things to be published on the web. The only caveat I would make is that web
>> pages, by their very nature, can disappear in seconds whereas my Kodachrome
>> slides can, with proper care, last indefinitely.
>>
>> As for the point I have quoted above, no, it is not evidence of lack of
>> funding, nor even necessarily of lack of space. It may simply be lack of
>> interest.
>
><snip>
>
>I think I can add a bit of professional expertise here: It *is* a lack
>of exhibit space. Most art museums exhibit items with a lot of
>"respectful space" around them: they are individual items presented
>without context. With only a given amount of exhibit space, there are
>only so many artifacts that can be on exhibit at any one time.
>
>At the same time, even my museum --we pride ourselves for having
>"context-rich" exhibits--can only put up so many artifacts. We have abut
>20,000 artifacts in the collections, but only 200-300 are on exhibit at
>any one time.
I should lend you the services of my wife. She would get them all out
on display for you, within about six weeks. :-)
Eric Stevens
Inger E Johansson
"Eric Stevens" <eric.s...@sum.co.nz> skrev i meddelandet
news:cf5pavse2o25qreoo...@4ax.com...
<snip>
One of my favorite museums, not only because I worked there as Gunnar
Lindqvist's secretary one year in late 1980's, is Östergötland's Länsmuseum.
Unfortunatly their portal isn't in English and it isn't complete but they
have found a good way of presenting item + context in a very interesting
way. The exhibitions contains an enormous amount of item, especially in
Smedstorp a 18th century farm still cultivated in it's original form, in
Löfstad Castle where you can walk around in the rooms and in a garden still
preserved as it was when the last owner lived in it. It's alike may such
museums here in Europe.
Portal url:http://www.linkoping.se/lansmuseum/info.html
One of the dept. 'Medicinhistoriska' has an exhibition which I really like.
Items are shown first in the 'ordinary way' tk describes but also in models
(the one on the picture of the url is normal size) and full interior
exhibition.
http://www.linkoping.se/lansmuseum/medicin.html
The Egyptian collection is more alike normal exhibitions.
http://www.linkoping.se/lansmuseum/egypt.html
for the moment there are two St Birgitta exhibitions one Art and one
artifacts two different styles.
http://www.linkoping.se/lansmuseum/utst.html
anyhow what I would like to stress is the fact that it's possible to show
artifacts in good contexts on net as well as in ordinary exhibitions. I
talked to my former collegues no one had the figure for items shown in each
exhibition, but they are much more than the figures tk gives from his museum
and most of them in better context as well if you walk around in real life.
The net version is under work but I guess it will be a good one when it's
completed.
I wonder why so many museums around the world don't take a chance to produce
a good netversion of an exhibition? Don't say that it doesn't pay, good work
live on and can be completed more than once.
Inger E
Ken Down
<som...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> What is this strange interest you have in 3000+ year old, leather
> underpants Ken? Why should you wish to reconstruct them? Would they fit?
> We should be told!
:-)
They were just an example of a unique artefact that probably most people had
never heard of.
Ken Down
wrote:
> At the same time, even my museum
Hi, Thomas. Can you give a curator's view on what Roger and I (and others)
have been saying about photography?
What is your museum's policy?
What are the reasons for that policy?
What do you think about Joe Public and his camera as a resource?
Ken Down
<eric.s...@sum.co.nz> wrote:
> Umm - I'm afraid its not that simple. See
> http://www.fotoinfo.com/info/technicalinfo/stability.html
No, it's not simple, but I'll back my slides against your CDs - to say
nothing of your hard disk - any day.
Yuri Kuchinsky
: Yuri Kuchinsky <yu...@clio.trends.ca> wrote in message news:<4wzqa.795$Kp3.884758
: 7...@news.nnrp.ca>...
:> In soc.history.ancient Roger Pearse <roger_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
:>
:> ...
:>
:> : Columba took the hint, sailed off to Scotland and established himself
:> : on the island of Iona. His missionaries evangelised all that part of
:> : Scotland and Northumbria, and by converting them to Christianity made
:> : possible the synod of Whitby and so the unification of England. And
:> : Columba became St. Columba. And the father of many books.
:>
:> Well, I guess this just shows how much Roger knows about British
:> history....
: Mmm. I think it does. <smile>
Roger,
The point that I'm making is very simple. The faith tradition of Columba
was independent from Rome. The Celtic Church, descendants of Columba,
followed many non-Roman practices and observances with direct parallels in
Syria and Israel.
So it's wrong to say that the work of Columba "made possible the synod of
Whitby". OTOH, if one says that the work of Columba _was undone_ by the
synod of Whitby, this will be much closer to the truth.
:> Hint: The main purpose of the synod of Whitby was actually to *suppress*
:> the legacy of Columba.
: <smile> I can see the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede smiling at me
: from the shelves of my bookcase, and St. Adomnan's "Life of St.
: Columba" on the next shelf... Old friends, the first two. I even
: live within a few miles of Sutton Hoo.
All of these represent merely a one-sided Catholic apology for what
happened. Hence your poor understanding of this part of British history.
: I'm not sure why you imagined that I didn't know all this, but I did,
: and this is why I mentioned the Synod of Whitby. All of Britain was
: re-Christianized, and Columba achieved what Rome never had, the
: conversion of all the North.
Actually, there's no evidence that Rome had _anything_ to do with the
emergence of the Celtic Church.
: Meanwhile Augustine and his lads were doing the South.
Augustine was the Inquisitor, sent expressly to suppress "heresy" in the
British Isles.
: The Synod of Whitby then involved the agreement on a
: single form of this, based on Rome, which created an ecclesiastical
: unity -- the precursor, surely, of political unity.
Not really. The "Synod of Whitby" wasn't really a Synod, and it created no
unity. This was just one step in the gradual undoing of the Celtic Church.
:> Because the Celtic Church, for which Columba was the main inspiration, was
:> very different from the Roman Catholic Church.
: If you say so.
I and lots of other serious scholars. As opposed to the apologists for the
faith.
: I rather doubt that Columba would have, tho.
That's because you know so little about the Celtic Church.
:> The so-called synod of Whitby
: Why 'so-called'? It was a synod, and it happened at Whitby.
You still have a lot to learn about these things, my friend...
http://www.orthodoxireland.com/looking.htm
[quote]
Much has been written about the "Easter
controversy," which culminated at the so-called
Synod of Whitby in 664. Some claim that it was here
that the independent Celtic Church was subjugated
to the authority of Rome. But in fact this is not what
happened at Whitby. Rather clerics from Lindisfarne,
a daughter house of Columba's monastery at Iona,
debated the correct method of dating Easter -- a
movable feast -- with advocates of Roman usage.
The debate was concerned with issues of religious
observance, but its outcome was a very practical
one. When the "Celtic Easter" lost the argument, its
supporters handed Lindisfarne over to the victors and
left for Ireland.
This incident marked a crucial turning point and
greatly reduced Iona's influence in northern England,
but it shouldn't be made into more than it really was.
... In clinging to the "Celtic Easter," the monks of
Lindisfarne simply wanted to stay true to the ways of
their father Columba.
[unquote]
:> really represented an attempt on the part of the Roman missionaries
:> to subdue Celtic Christianity. And it took them many centuries after
:> Whitby before they could accomplish that.
: I think there is a large component of modern myth-making going on
: here.
No, this myth-making was very ancient. Its authors were the apologists for
the Roman Church.
Yours,
Yuri.
Baqqesh shalom veradphehu -- Seek peace and pursue it (Psalm 34:15)
Yuri Kuchinsky -- http://www.trends.ca/~yuku -- Toronto
Yuri Kuchinsky
: Yuri,
: I second Roger. Due to St. Colomba being a descendant to Niall, who actually
: came from Ranriki later on called Viken before his family moved to the
: island north of Scotland, I have studied every document I have been able to
: lay my hand on. Not only the ones mentioned above but also Colomba's own
: writing and some annals rarely mentioned. One I had the University Library
: in Linköping to send a recuest abroad for and that one was among those that
: had to be in a safe when I didn't look at it.
Inger,
Obviously both you and Roger know very little about the faith tradition of
Columba and the Celtic Church. It was independent from Rome. They were
Judaizers, and followed many Jewish practices.
Regards,
Yuri.
Yuri Kuchinsky -=O=- http://www.trends.ca/~yuku
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority,
it is time to reform -=O=- Mark Twain
tkavanagh
>
> In article <3EAC83E1...@indiana.edu>, tkavanagh <tkav...@indiana.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > At the same time, even my museum
>
> Hi, Thomas. Can you give a curator's view on what Roger and I (and others)
> have been saying about photography?
>
> What is your museum's policy?
> What are the reasons for that policy?
> What do you think about Joe Public and his camera as a resource?
Generally, we allow J. Q. Public to photograph in the museum, but not
for publication (If they want for publication, we require that the
artifact be photographed by our photographer.) The only exception would
be of loaned artifacts for which we don't have photographic rights
(although we have started including that on loan contracts).
The light levels emitted by modern flashes are far less than the old
bulbs.
I do not really understand the difficulty you have been having with
museums refusing to provide photographs of artifacts/maps. Before coming
here, I was the artifact researcher for the Smithsonian's Handbook of
North American Indian, and we the only time we ever had problems getting
photographs of artifacts was when they were on exhibit and it was too
difficult to remove them for photography (e.g. on a manikin).
tk