As promised, I met with this gentleman today, Tom Carson, and he showed me some of his enormous PDF archive of Tennessee and Chattanooga history. He leads this area's Adobe users group, and is making much more out of a PDF than I've ever attempted to. I always thought it was just a handy way of getting a word file from point A to point B without losing any of the formatting or font styles. But there he is, with clickable hyperlinks built into maps, really nice images of old Tennessee currency, sketches of the city, etc. He's definitely coming at it all from more of the collector's or archivist's point of view, whereas I'm more into the creative "let's make it look beautiful" side of things when it comes to digitizing history. What I saw of his work today seems very well-suited for the library (although he said they weren't interested in purchasing it from him), and he says his goal is to make a "virtual archive" of Chattanooga history. If that were to happen, I'd love to see his "stack" of documents spiced up with video, oral history, art, etc... but that's me, always wanting a little more. Anyway, we certainly haven't seen the last of this guy!
Here's an article about Tom Carson's work.
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3 comments:
i'm like you christie. i would want to bring it to life with more layers and textures and movement.... so much potential. would love to see a list of what he's got - does he have a website or link to some space where things are parked? -m.
Here ya go. Here's the information about his stuff: $85 for the complete set. http://www.historyebooks.biz/
He's pretty protective about his collection, and not too keen about putting it on the web. I personally think this is counterintuitive to how things go these days. From what I observe, more and more it's about sharing, being completely transparent, and doing everything you can to remove the obstructions between people and information. I do believe someone like Tom should be able to earn a living, but there's got to be bigger, more public support for that kind of work, if it indeed is worthy... which I think it is.
thanks for le link!
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