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Roger Pearse wrote: > Agreed. But we need to get past this short-sighted selfishness. I > suggest that we keep bombarding them with requests to photograph. I feel this will be counter-productive. Sure, continue to request to be allowed to photograph (and be clear on what you are allowed to do with those photographs), where necessary for research. Making many such requests just to encourage them to become more lax in their policies will probably just result in the opposite. :-( >> But the money doesn't exist to continue it. > > Nor will it ever. We need reader photography, and that means lobbying > libraries and their boards. Is this necessarily the case? Or is it simply that there needs to be commercial interest in doing this. Proquest obviously felt that there was enough commercial interest in books 1473 and 1700 in order to entirely photograph nearly 125,000 works. These images form the basis of the hugely popular Early English Books Online. And now many are having full text created with the EEBO-TCP project.[1] What is it that makes this a commercial and possible reality for works of this period but not works of an earlier period? > "Have you pestered your local library chairman today?" <smile> I believe Reg Carr, director of the Bodleian (which I'd understand as my local library chairman), understands these issues. Hence Bodley's participation in the Google mass digitisation of it 19thC collection. ;-) -James -- Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford