Andrew Gray said:
Are the proposed digitisation projects asking us for
additional
funding, or to underwrite the entire process?
Both:
One is an idea for getting 2,000 unique WWII artworks professionally
scanned by their curator, we would fund all the basic costs (I'm
encouraging the proposal to be written up) and the results would be
freely released for a parallel collaboration project on Commons. This
is a manageable size, time limited and easily justifiable in terms of
impact and value.
A far more complex idea (concept stage) is a partnership for scanning
several hundreds of thousands of scientific documents and artefacts
with (another) national institution who we have yet to talk with. It
would probably be sensible for us to co-partner, in the sense that I
doubt we would fund the entire programme, or even be part of the
management team, but we would commit to ensuring that the results are
made available to the obvious Wikimedia projects in a way that
encourages e-volunteers to reuse the results. One risk for such a
proposal and whether we can commit to it, is the time it is likely to
take to put forward and length of time to execute, this raises an
administrative burden if we rely on annual grants or are officially
required to spend all our money every 12 months.
All proposals will be put up on the open wiki when they are received in writing.
Cheers,
Fae
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