Another stolen photo from NYPL hits eBay!

[philliesphan]

providing the item to the FBI for their analysis of the item.

Ultimately, unless NYPL will make an affirmative title claim here, it seems very difficult to imagine a scenario that they FBI can come to any conclusion other than the item is consistent with items taken from the collection, but otherwise unable to state definitively that the item was inventoried, removed and is thus is stolen goods.

[steve B]

And that makes a great argument for libraries and archives to scan as much as possible and catalog it better. With a scan they'd be able to get closer to knowing for sure it was theirs. Even if not used online, good scans would allow access without needing to risk the originals in any way.


Steve B

[michael3322]

Steve makes an excellent point.

Not only does scanning ensure that libraries/museums have a record of what items are theirs in cases like these, scanning would allow some of this rare material to be made available on the web for baseball historians and enthusiasts.

The Library of Congress website has, for example, Spalding Baseball Guides from 1889-1939, digitized and freely available to read.

Those gems of baseball history that reside in libraries and never get read should be scanned and uploaded to websites, however the resources to do so are often unavailable. That would be a great volunteer project, if it could be coordinated properly...

[drc]

I'm sure the NYCPL has volunteers. Someone here could volunteer to scan and document, and it would look good on his hobby resume.

Trivia: The NYC Public Library is the second largest in the world. The first is the Library of Congress.