Re: The myth of coding from specimens firsthand and the untapped resource of photos

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

>  The time to prepare the photographic database would be long, and
>  costly, and certainly involve massive amounts of patience, and in a
>  time of economic floundering, when the US at least has been cutting
>  back its "discretionary" science spending and certain vociferous
>  factions antithetical to Science have risen up (especially in
>  connection to "ClimateGate"), most researchers opting to take
>  personal projects on should have to shoulder the burden of their
>  desires. Any further increase in the quality of virtual data as a
>  resource takes time and money, and we can spend that either
>  travelling to the sources, or paying for the sources to develop
>  resources to negate that.

What is cheaper: an institution paying for having its collections 
photographed, or the same institution paying its researchers to zoom 
around the globe again and again?

I bet it's the former by an order of magnitude or two.

The need to travel around the globe to see specimens will not disappear; 
but if we can restrict it, while at the same time _decreasing_ our 
dependence on crappy line drawings, that's exactly what we should do.