From JTS 2007
Am at the JTS 20007 conference in Toronto, listening to an amazing presentation by Giovanna Fossati, Curator of the Nederlands Filmmuseum about Images for the Future, a $233mm, seven year project to preserve, digitize, and make accessible more than 285,000 hours of film and video, along with 3 million still images.
While the speeds and feeds portion of the presentation was inspiring for its scope and scale, what was most shocking was the mindset. Behind this project is a deep, societal appreciation of archives as a public good that must be publicly funded. If this project were similarly scaled in the U.S., e.g. on a per capita basis, this would be a $4.1 billion dollar project. Sounds about right to me.