MicrostockGroup

He can afford it. Having just made 300+ people redundant in the UK   

The various offices of Magnum used to contain boxes and boxes full of duplicate prints - for circulation and distribution to the clients. Before computers there were boxes marked eg hats, beards, cars, dogs etc. It was a very analogue system although later they introduced some degree of color coding. When a request came in the picture researchers would go through the boxes pulling out potentially suitable images.

Same as they had draws full of transparencies.

I'm guessing that it is the for - distribution prints which have been sold. Later those would even I think often have been RC rather than fibre based prints. So whilst these are going to be interesting and valuable artefacts (nicely stamped etc) I doubt they all have the same value as, say, archival gallery prints.

I could be wrong.

ETA: I guess that the agency side has now been digitized and the archival print side continues as ever. Good for them for selling off what is effectively no longer needed. It's still a co op.

Gates set up Corbis, he didn't buy it.

Wow that was good. I have to go shopping and come back to read the whole thing very carefully.

At first I was wondering why a year old thread, about Dell preserving a collection and donating it to a university, was being brought back from the dead pool, but now your message tagged it with some interesting background on Corbis. Thanks!