I might also add that, though Bill speaks highly of me, I feel sure that Scott and Mark would be doing much more of the heavy lifting so to speak when it comes to identifying the unknowns. Having worked on similar projects with other institutions, including helping the LoC clean up many misidentifications in their own archives, they bring much more experience to the table when it comes to a Herculean task such as this. Even Hercules took 12 years to complete his 12 labors though, and even adopting the "divide and conquer" approach, it's just not realistic to expect that all of the work be completed on-site in a day or two.
I do understand their concerns with duplicating the images (believe me, I'm sick of wading through all of the cheap reprints made from Library of Congress scans that proliferate on eBay), but at the same time, there are certainly steps that could be taken to ensure that the images are useful enough for research and identification of the players depicted while not being useful for mass-reproduction. Perhaps much of that would be done during the digitizing phase, which it doesn't seem they are ready to undertake yet (financially speaking), but it's hard being patient and waiting for them to get to that point. Perhaps our interest in the collection can help spur them to action (especially considering the National is in town practically every other year), but in the meantime, it seems that many of the images will remain in obscurity and unidentified.
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