You might remember how in the recent past, certain stock-photo companies I’ve dealt with have either a) shipped their photos off toa coal mine in Pennsylvania, making them unavailable, or, b) digitized 1/10 of their collection and made the other 90% unavailable.
Well, I just e’d a wonderful college collection I’ve used in my other books, about an actress I am thinking of doing my next book on. Here’s the reply I just got: “Thank you for your inquiry regarding the [actress] images we have here in the Performing Arts Collection. We have more than 25 photographic images of her in our Theater Biography Collection. Unfortunately, we are unable to xerox photographs for research anymore, for conservation reasons. Given the amount of images we have, do you have an idea, of photos that you may have seen, how many of these photographs do you wish to have copies of?”
Whaaaa? “We can’t tell you what photos we have . . . Let us know which ones you want?”