The National Baseball Hall of Fame is like the U.S. National Archive with millions of items. The Hall of Fame states:
The Museum’s collections contain more than 45,000 three-dimensional artifacts and 130,000 baseball cards. The Library catalogs and preserves nearly three million documents including 500,000 historic photographs and 15,000 hours of original audio and video recordings.
Wow. Just how many of those items are in the Hall of Fame? Can I get my artful scorecards into the Hall?
Baseball scorecard expert, Erik Maldre, says over IM, “that’s a lot of stuff. I wonder how big the exhibit space is in the HOF.”
I wanna know how big their storage facility is. How does the Hall of Fame index all their items? Certainly with over 3 million items, they have to have some sort of catalog system.
The Hall of Fame should open up their database system to the public. The U.S. National Archives already has a website where you can search 1,879,709 digital documents* through NARA’s Online Public Access (OPA). Can you imagine being able to search through over 3 million items in the Hall of Fame’s records?
I just hope that if the Hall of Fame ever does digitally archive their materials, that they do a better job with the image resolution than the World Series programs. Those images are so small, they aren’t even a high enough of a resolution for my iPad.
C’mon Hall of Fame! Give us some high-resolution images of your collection!
*The 1,879,709 number is confirmed by the National Archives via email.
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