Digitizing the Archive

Scott Libin has a great piece up at the Poynter Institute that looks at deals newspapers have been cutting with photo collector John Rogers. Rogers, who claims to have a passion for photography, has been offering to digitize news photo collections and add in all the metadata in exchange for the physical prints. News organizations get the digital files back that are now quickly searchable.

The question is what does Rogers get out of this – and that’s one that hasn’t really been answered. All of the deals have had some sort of non-disclosure agreement associated with them. Will he sell the prints? Does he now have the rights to sell reprints? No one knows, but newspapers are clamoring to sign up.