Help build a Photo Time Machine

Come on…how often in your life do you get to help build a Photo Time Machine?

“Photo Time Machine is going to be a web resource and an application for visual storytelling through old photographs. It will let people observe how places, things they love have been changing as well as tell the stories of their families, places and more –  leave their mark on history. 

We combine a great many different photo archives – both private and institutional – into a huge simple and easy to navigate network. We make it available to people because history belongs to all of us and is made by all of us. That’s why we will work on a UGC principle (user-generated content) – we all have great old photos to share.  It’s also important to create such a resource now when the world gets smaller. We want to know more about our history as well as about different cultures. It makes us more interested in the world we live in. And we’re sure that many other people share the same feeling.”

According to one of my secret sources (Igor Trepeshchenok) several large institutions are already ready to collaborate, among them:

The State Archives of Florida
The National Archive of the Netherlands
The National Archive of Norway
The Oregon State University Archive
The Seattle Municipal Archive
The Library of Virginia
The U.S. National Archives

Pretty impressive. I’m not sure why that info’s not on the kickstarter page.

Igor also says:

“It will cover the period starting from the middle of the 19th century, when photography became popular as new media and until the end of the 20th century, 15 years before the current moment to keep a distance from today.

Users will be able upload their photographs to build up the image of the world, to leave their mark and visualize the history of their families, places and things they love. The resource will be interesting for a wide range of audience as it is able to offer material related to many different themes and spheres of human life such as sport, fashion, architecture, celebrities or simply your home town.”

The project is over here on Kickstarter, and it needs $55k.

55k seems like a lot to me…maybe it’s not for the work involved, but I would appreciate a better explanation of where that money’s going, and why 55k is a fair deal. I feel I also need to know more about how the ‘machine’ will really differentiate itself from many other image libraries. Otherwise, it looks like it could be a great project.