Achievement on any scale

So I spent last week scanning 750 historic newsprint articles for a history project. I thought I might have earned my wings in the "grunt-work" archivers-hall-of-fame.

And then this weekend I read this NYT article about the digital restoration of Lawrence of Arabia - one of my favorite films. There I learned that the tech crew "spent three months in 2009 simply inspecting the negative, one frame at a time (more than 320,000 frames in all), repairing rips and tears, just so it could run through a scanner without breaking." Yikes! Once that process was done they took a year to make the ground-braking scan (8.8 million pixels per frame!)

A remarkable investment of time, technology, and attention to detail for a one-of-a-kind piece of human achievement. On that point, we share some common ground.