>just letting people use
don't dismiss the value in simply making them accessible. they're providing a platform to access these works, which is great.
don't dismiss the value in simply making them accessible. they're providing a platform to access these works, which is great.
ADHD fail on my part! I even skimmed the article and totally didn't even parse that basic bit of context. Considering that Getty Images (originally photodisc) didn't appear until the early 90s, I'd love to see this turn into a Worldwide Wildlife Federation/Wordwide Wrestling Federation thing.
It being a museum makes it a lot more compelling though. Great job Getty!
>The sad part is that the Getty gets to do these kinds of things only because it's one of the best endowed institutions on the planet with funding to pay researchers/archivists/developers to do this work
And even within those institutions there's still more work than could feasibly be done. I worked in one of the best-funded, if not the best-funded non-governmental library systems on the planet and they've got an order of magnitude more things that need to be digitized than what they've already done, and they do a LOT already.
The compilation of that collection is obviously more considerable. Archivists at Getty have already said it is about 10 years work for ~20 people.
I wasn't talking about the software development side, and I certainly wouldn't call the tech end of this a significant part of the 'intellectual work.' Organizing and managing 88k images is something my laptop 10 years ago wouldn't balk at, serving them is something a low-tier vps could do, and supporting CRUD apps for the archivists, etc are usually trivial. I think you're massively underestimating the importance of other people's tasks in these operations. Even as a developer, the people-focused work-- e.g. working with the other teams to strategize about how tech could best suit their processes, training, design iterations, etc.-- was more work than any technical component.