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Date	Original Topic
8th January 2005	New section: Gallery! By Miguel May I suggest a new section in rorkesdriftvc.com, called Gallery, in which we can find together all the graphic material scattered all around the site? Plus, possibly some excellent stuff I was fortunate enough to see, courtesy of John Young and Ron Sheeley?
Date	Replies
8th January 2005	Alan Critchley Good idea Miguel. But I just wonder what the advantage would be apart from additional work for us and less for visitors? Seriously, if there is a good reason, we would consider it. Maybe sections of particular subjects such as a portrait gallery, maps section, old photos compared to recent etc. We're always open to suggestions, and help. Alan
8th January 2005	Julian whybra Might there not be complications regarding copyright material?
8th January 2005	Martin Everett Miguel, These are my thoughts – just floating some ideas. Just a follow up on what Alan has said. As Adrian points out copyright is a major issue to overcome. The Anglo-Zulu war has produced a number of the quite heated copyright disputes in recent times. Leaving the thorny issue of copyright aside for the moment, images have to be scanned and accurately captioned – not always easy with old photographs. It takes much time and effort as I have found today when ploughing through some 300 scanned photographs of the 20,000-25,000 we hold in the museum archives. Not all relating to the AZW, I might add. We have to scan at the highest possible resolution so that we can protect the fragile originals for future generations and then produce lower level ‘delivery’ images. For an on-line gallery we would probably have use thumbnail versions. It is inevitable that everyone will want to cut & paste form the gallary in order to use the images for their own purposes and not just to view. The lower quality of these images may not satisfy some users. To manually handle requests for higher quality images would be labour intensive and in my experience there are always those want something for nothing – forgetting the time involved for research, scanning, handling and postage by the provider. You will see that the Imperial War Museum charges £20 (plus VAT) image for this type of service which, I believe, is not unrealistic bearing in mind the initial set-up effort and handling costs of orders. But you are getting a service from the comfort of your armchair as they say. http://collections.iwm.org.uk/server/show/nav.00g005001 Perhaps, if that is type of chargeable service is a runner and there are potential funds, then a fully automated system could be developed whereby a high quality images can be delivered via email with on-line payment by credit card a lower cost.
9th January 2005	Miguel You are right, I hadn't seen it from that perspective. Let's forget about it, too many potential problems and too much work involved. Thanks for clarifying this for me.