[Foundation-l] GLAM in Holland

Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen at gmail.com
Sun Jul 12 07:35:49 UTC 2009


Hoi,
This is not about the NPG, it is about relations with GLAM in general. What
we aim to do; inform people with the knowledge of the world takes many
illustrations. Small sized versions of the NPG material is publicly
available. The issue is that material that is not available in a high
resolution was lifted. High resiolution material does not really help us
satisfy our need to illustrate our projects that much more then lower
resolution material does.

While I am all in favour of getting as much material available in as high a
quality as possible I do think rip and run is not in our best interest. For
every image we see on the website of a GLAM there are typically many more
that are not on the website. I would argue that when an organisation like
the London based National Portrait Gallery is not willing to collaborate
with us, we should not make a point of that as there are so many other GLAM
that do want to collaborate with us. We can have their low resolution images
without this kind of controversy and our objectives are as well served by
them.

So please, let us focus on all those organisations that want to partner with
us and by making that a success provide the NPG with arguments why it is in
their best interest to partner with us. The good thing is that it will give
us time to absorb material. We need to do justice to the material that we
get, check the annotations and integrate it in our projects. When we do this
well, the NPG would benefit from partnering with us and, we would equally
benefit from such a partnership.
Thanks,
       GerardM


2009/7/12 John at Darkstar <vacuum at jeb.no>

> This is important; is it possible to get some kind of agreement with the
>  NPG and what will it cost us? Some museums are willing to support our
> mission, but we can't just assume that they are in a possition to accept
>  every rip-off from their web sites and other publications.
>
> John
>
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > I am saddened about the current situation about the National Portrait
> > Gallery and the high resolution pictures that were lifted from its
> website.
> > The problem that I have is in the vocabulary used, it paints the NPG as
> our
> > enemy and we are to use pitch forks and fiery speeches to make them aware
> of
> > our displeasure and our wish to fight. It is sad because it is exactly
> the
> > kind of rhetoric that may damage our budding relations with GLAM in for
> > instance the Netherlands. (GLAM is galleries libraries archives museums).
> >
> > There is much happening in the Netherlands when it comes to the
> collections
> > of GLAM. There are limited subsidies for digitising material and this is
> > happening. Much of the material becomes available on the Internet. We are
> > talking and have been talking for many months about sharing and using our
> > digital heritage on Commons and Wikipedia. There have been talks with
> > national organisations and individual museums. There are many powerful
> > arguments why we want to partner with GLAM.
> >
> >    - we need many illustrations for our Wikipedias and we want to have a
> >    choice of illustrations for all our Wikipedias
> >    - it is important that we have provenance for our illustrations, not
> just
> >    for copyright reasons but particularly to prove the value as an
> illustration
> >       - photoshop or gimp can give a picture a whole new meaning
> >    - by partnering with GLAM we open their world to our communities, Wiki
> >    loves art is one project that shows that we can
> >    - by prartnering with GLAM we gain in respectability
> >
> > Recently I have been blogging about our budding relation with the Tropen
> > museum. We are looking at an initial upload of some 100.000 illustrations
> > that are of particular relevance to our Indonesian projects. These
> > illustrations will become available at a similar resolution as the ones
> of
> > the Bundesarchiv. They will be old photos and other flat techniques but
> also
> > photos of three dimensional objects. We are talking on how we can grow
> the
> > relation in the future. We talked about releasing high resolution scans
> of
> > material that needs restoration, we talked about their object of the
> month
> > project..
> >
> > There are two other GLAM that we are talking to at the moment. They are
> as
> > relevant as the Tropen musuem. I am fearful about the development of our
> > relation with them and with the development of the national
> organisations. I
> > am saddened because I fear that it will now be not as easy to develop all
> > these relations.
> > Thanks,
> >       GerardM
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