Posted By:
warshawlawGiven how many non-baseball cards there are (far, far more than the baseball holdings), I don't think the HOF or any other museum is going to receive them. As long as the Met has a chunk of the collection, it might as well keep the whole thing.
Since I was able to visit and review non-baseball cards, I got some feel for the size of the collection and the ratio of what would be interesting if scanned versus what would be junk. I do not think that more than a tiny % of the collection would be of sufficient interest to merit scanning. According to the OOP index of the collection (I have a PDF of it), there are 660 albums/boxes. Of those, perhaps 50 are sports-related. The key baseball issues are in approximately 20 albums. If those were scanned, you would cover the prewar (WWII) collection. Add in other early sports and you perhaps get to 40 albums, max, and many of those albums are of interest only as to a few pages (e.g., N28-29-43, which occupy a handful of pages in album 201). I'd bet a reputable scanning service using the newest possible software and equipment could complete the work in under a week. I use services like that all the time to obtain documents in lawsuits.