Ropefish:
I am curious as well. As some of us may be aware, there seemed to be a commotion in Tallahassee when another member of the working class made a request to BAR in the last year or so and a ridiculous quote for records service was returned. I am not up on the details myself... maybe somebody else can fill us in.
In all deference to the reality of data collection and storage, I am sure (at least I HOPE) that the BAR has literally tons of paper records, to wit: daily log sheets, dating way back to the time of William Kidd, et al, which are probably a real pain to research. With that in mind, I always thought it would be interesting to scan all those records, index them, and digitally re-compile them with an eye toward pin-mapping the records in the fashion first accomplished by the Fishers. However, I would leave a copy of all the digitally indexed images with BAR, vested in a database, and would make the resulting recompilation a public record.
The question here would seem to be whether this would be a violation of the exception rules in Chapter 119 of the FSS, the pubic records law. The BAR has the authority to decide what is an intrusion upon the master site file, however, Florida's lack of interest in promoting salvage leads me to believe that the marine exploration and recovery operations are of no concern to BAR administrators aside from the occasional fatigue they must suffer through research requests. They have pretty much washed their hands of any affiliation with that data because it comes from parties with whom they have no desire to be affiliated with... I'm being gentle.
Let's say that it were possible to do what I have suggested: no doubt, records custodians could object to anybody man handling the records, and would only be able to cooperate if the records in their paper format were processed and returned to storage exactly as they were found, meaning that they were not re-sorted, stolen, or damaged. This could only be guaranteed if a BAR staff member was assigned to oversee the actual scanning process, or a proctor were hired, paid for by third parties so that the BAR operation's budget was not impacted. The resulting product would be something that could be passed on, in digital format (CD's/DVD's) to anyone making research requests. It would not be necessary for the BAR to devote any staff time to hunting through the records. The requestor of such information could have the records and search them their selves, paying only for a copy of the digital media. Because you can cram 700 megs of scanned images with a small database onto a single DVD, I doubt that more than several disks would ever be a full product issue. All the pages could be scanned to G4 TIFF format (FAX format... very small in bytesize). I know this works well as I performed this service for the Brevard County Property Appraiser's Office where we did this with all the survey plat maps for the county, housing them online for office use. In fact, these same images are available to the public at the appraiser's website. Where records maintained by government are in digital format here in Florida are concerned, the custodian only has the need to furnish the data as it is stored when a record request is made. They are not required to furnish the data in a form desired by the public. That is the law. Therefore, it makes sense to have these records in a digital format wherein they become easily stored and delivered. There can be no argument to that.
To pull off such an operation, a high-speed page scanner would have to be rented/loaned/purchased. An ad-hoc representative responsible for the quality control and sanctity issues would be required. Very tight scheduling commitments would have to be agreed upon by the scanner working group and the BAR. The index elements would have to be jointly agreed upon, and the design of any supporting database would have to be agreed upon, in advance of the project.
Because such a product would be of interest to so many people in Florida, perhaps we could get some money from Kickstarter to handle it, were the project to see the light of day. Imagine what we could discover!
