On Jul 9, 2011, at 4:06 PM, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2011/7/9 <Birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com>
Snip
Having a corpus with some depth on Wikisource
will open up a much different
reading experience than an index of PDFs, even though the words all match.
Just look at what is being done with the SCOTUS documents, Wikis simply
offer a richer study environment for documents that are properly linked
together than other sorts of digital libraries. For all that born digital
documents emphasize the "digital" they often treat the text as if printed on
a page by regularly using hypertext only in footnoted references. It is
worth putting such things on Wikisource, if you can anticipate being able to
get a decent sized corpus of scholarship of some field under a free license.
And that will vary by field and maybe even sub-specialty.
Yes, it is definiw ittely worth it to put all these text on Wikisource.
I uploaded my thesis years ago, also with the explicit aim to test the
potential hypertextual features of Wikisource (in it.source we have proper
template for Work and Author citations, and I find them the real added value
of our digital library).
My point (working in an academic digital library and just seeing the amount
of thesis, dissertation, articles passing by) is that if for people is a
difficult, overcomplicated burden to upload a PDF in an institutional
repository (5 minutes of their time, even less), how can we wikilibrarians
think that they will come to us and upload and "curate" their text? I
clearly remeber the "Screw it" feeling I had the day after I graduated,
meaning that I would not even touch my thesis again for the next months (and
so it was).
I'm not offering solutions here, but if we want to work in the direction of
Open Access and of reaching a massive audience out there, maybe we should
think out of the (current) box.
I wouldn't really expect authors adding their thesis to Wikisource piecemeal, at least
unitil there is some critical mass reached in their area of scholarship. It would be
probably started by someone more interested in creating well-linked coverage of a topic.
Definitely it needs someone with a strong interest in curating schorship of Foo in
big-picture way.
BirgitteSB