I collected the Deed of Gift from the Museum signed by Michelle Ryan who is Manager of Publications & Photography. The Queensland Museum has now officially accepted my donation of my Image Library. As with the State Library’s collection of all the unedited footage, there is a clause which provides for the inclusion of additional material. Michelle and I are trying to find a way of raising money for the Museum to publish my One small place on earth book which I am currently re-writing. Fingers crossed.
Hugh Alexander having witnessed my signature, I today posted two copies of the Deed of Gift for my Image Library to the Queensland Museum, one copy of which will be posted to me signed by the Museum. Negotiations took a while because I have retained copyright. I gather the Museum owns all rights for all but a few of the donations it receives.
I was thrilled and touched to receive a hand-written letter from David Attenborough thanking me for the photos of the Log Cabin Case Moth and the letter about finding it that I sent him. He wrote that he had never seen the dewlling of a Log Cabin Case Moth before and that he found it fascinating.
My February 8 post was about walking past a cycad growing next to the footpath for years and years after I first filmed it and not noticing the white beech tree that had all but smothered it. Jaap alerted Land Care who liaised with Council to do the work. On today’s walk I was overjoyed to see the cycad unencumbered once again. The tree stumps remain as a reminder of the intruder. Removing them may endanger the cycad.
Following an earlier email to Dave Allen, the IT guru at the State Library, about Steve and I supplying data files for an additional 20 tapes of unedited footage as per the Deed of Gift, my follow-up email elcited an immediate response. Dave still has the hard drive onto which Steve copies the files and he has emailed us about dropping the hard drive off so that Steve can get to work on them.
I renewed my domain names for two years today. I started to renew online until I saw the price which was more than double the cost two years ago. So I phoned Melbourne IT and renewed at the old price which is probably extortionate.
The official receipt from the NFSA for the 215 species videos arrived today. A week ago I received a scary email from the curator who thought we had only sent 146 movies until she double-checked the USBs and confirmed that there were 73 movies on one USB and 142 movies on the other.
Steve received a quote from the camera repair man he contacted who had indicated that we would need a new lens assembly which would cost a little less than $1400, an amount well on the way towards the cost of a new camera. I will soldier on with the Sony and use my remaining four tapes. The filmic blemishes are more evident than I would like, but the new frames and species videos are more or less up to the job.
Today I posted 2 USB sticks containing 215 HD Species Videos plus an excel folder with taxonomic and descriptive information plus the year each video was uploaded to Vimeo, to the National Film and Sound Archive in Sydney. The videos had to be retitled to include species and family names. a process we began in May 2015.