Advertising
 
As Luminous-Lint has over 10 million page views a year this would appear the most obvious way forward. Advertising clutters the page and blurs the boundaries between a commercial and a community supported project. I said I would never do this and many of you have supplied materials on that basis so advertising is ruled out.
 

Selling products and services
 
The aim of Luminous-Lint has always been to organize materials from vast numbers of institutions and private collections to establish and analyse those connections. On Luminous-lint there are over 40,000 internal links just for British calotypists which gives you a sense of the scale. The project has been and continues to be about pushing forward scholarship a step at a time. It is a long term project and inappropriate to the marketing of cameras and books. The Amazon links are included as a convenience to the community and provide minimal income. Selling products and services is not in my opinion the way forward.
 

Grants
 
There are grants one could apply for and coming from university teaching and research I’ve been involved with those over the years. As I’m not affiliated with an institution this rules out most grants and they are generally a short term fix rather than a long term solution for a project of this scale. Last year I proposed a Kickstarter project and thanks to all those who offered support. Unfortunately the project did not achieve the required goal and I need continuity of funding.
 
I applied for a Getty Research Scholarship Grant in 2013 for “The enhancement of digital publishing prototypes on the history of photography to determine the benefits of collaborative data collection, validation and sharing within the Getty and externally.” The proposal was not successful and you can read the Proposal and the Supporting document to get a sense of what I‘m planning.
 
The intention of this project is to provide high quality Open Content for the benefit of all.
 

Sponsorship
 
For almost six years Luminous-Lint was effectively supported by work I did on another photography project. This was, and continues to be, a fascinating project and I wish it well. Luminous-Lint requires financial support on its own to ensure continuation. If there is an organisation or individual interested in supporting photo-history then I would be interested and future plans will be adjusted accordingly.
 

Subscriptions
 
Many thousands of people and organisations have provided content and the entire project is enriched daily by the extraordinary material that arrives. As Luminous-Lint is for a community of like-minded enthusiasts instituting a subscription may be the solution. Images and user-supplied content such as online exhibitions would remain free to all whilst the more detailed visual indexes, reading lists, texts with footnotes and a host of other parts would require a subscription.
 
The subscription fee would be low enough that any student could afford it and pay for only the months when they are doing their studies. Those with a passion for the subject could pay a low monthly fee while institutions where there are photography cataloguers and curators would pay more. The intention of this is to support the project long term and I’m sure you appreciate the importance of that. There is no comparable resource in the arts on this scale and with the interconnectivity that is available on Luminous-Lint.
 

1. The raw evidence for photohistory is being collected - here the images and source materials are brought together to create a pool of information. This information has been organized into Online Exhibitions that mimic gallery exhibitions but with the important difference that they are continually improved. The Online Exhibitions may have an introductory text but they don't need to and one can be added in as necessary in the future.
    
   
2. Next the images are cross-linked into Visual Indexes which are similar to subject tags. There is a distinction however as tags normally provide a collection of images and it is not the same as Visual Indexes include ordering so they can be displayed in ways that tell stories.
    
   
3. Original source texts are the basis of research and so these are collected and organized. At this stage everything is like a vast melting pot of ideas swirling around before structures emerge.
    
   
4. For each theme bibliographies and reference lists are prepared so you can locate the supporting evidence.
    
   
5. The Contents pages, Visual Indexes and search tools are improving and they provide pathways through the material. These pathways can be fascinating as they can take one down unexpected routes many of which are not covered, or only tangentially, in the current literature. They provide the raw material for thinking about photohistory in ways that are novel and at times intriguing.