- Presumably these clay tablets have to be handled carefully when scanned
- These scans would ideally be high-resolution, requiring specialist equipment (I guess the BM has such equipment, but other institutions?)
- Once scanned, the images have to be stored somewhere (for how long?) with backups, etc
- To serve up the images to interested scholars, there has to be a system in place (over the web; is there authentication?; is it free?)
- Collaborating with other institutions who have done the same...
So lawsuits are only one of the problems with "just" scanning and OCR-ing. Still possible, of course.
I sat next to a guy working on the Genizah project (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah) and saw a tiny bit of the difficulties in doing something similar.
- Presumably these clay tablets have to be handled carefully when scanned - These scans would ideally be high-resolution, requiring specialist equipment (I guess the BM has such equipment, but other institutions?) - Once scanned, the images have to be stored somewhere (for how long?) with backups, etc - To serve up the images to interested scholars, there has to be a system in place (over the web; is there authentication?; is it free?) - Collaborating with other institutions who have done the same...
So lawsuits are only one of the problems with "just" scanning and OCR-ing. Still possible, of course.