If a Picture is Worth 1000 Words, What's a Medium Quality Scan Worth?

This presentation is based on the practical experience of archiving 46 thousand (plus) images taken by a Cameroonian studio photographer over a 30 years period as part of the British Library 'Endangered Archive Programme' (EAP). I will discuss some of the practical and conceptual issues of working with images collections, looking at how face recognition and pattern matching can help put some order into collections whose scope is too large for an individual to hold in their consciousness. Scaling up means we need technological assistance to explore large collections else we are constrained by human attention spans and memory. Scholarship needs to develop or at least face up to these limitations.