[Foundation-l] National Portrait Gallery

[Sage Ross]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 10:19 AM, geni<geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/18 Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net>:
>> In the case of the NPG, it is quite clear that the cost of the
>> digitalization is small compared with the potential benefit.
>> There are people and organisations willing to pay to have a copy of
>> these famous portraits. The issue is how to collect the funds without
>> puting a copyright on the images. For this, we need a new business
>> model. Think about how donations was raised to free up Blender.[1]
>>
>> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History
>
> €100,000 is not a significant amount of money when dealing with trying
> to digitalize the various UK archives.
>

The exact amount of money is beside the point.  I think the business
model analagous to Blender goes something like this:

A GLAM figures out the cost per item of its digitization project.
Take that, add some modest figure for subsidizing the rest of the
institution's activities, and that's the price for releasing any given
reproduction.  Anyone may contribute all or part of the price for
releasing any given work.  Once the full price has been reached, the
scan is made available for free to anyone.

Maybe this would happen in lots, with the most popular/useful/valuable
works digitized in the early lots with higher prices so that the
capital investments get recouped early on.  The next lot gets
digitized once a certain threshold is reached with the previous one
(e.g., the break-even point to finance the next lot).  Maybe there are
tiers for any given work:$X for 800px, $2X for 1600px, $4X for 3200px,
etc.  If the 1600px version is available already but you really need
the 3200px version, you pay the difference of $2X and now the 3200px
version is available for everyone.

The advantage of this scheme is that there are several groups who
would be likely to help pay for the digitization: publishers who need
hi-res versions and who would previously have paid for licensing; arts
lovers who would be making donations anyway (and who can now point
exactly to what their donation funded); free culture advocates.  And
if there is some way of recognizing the donors ("This portrait was
digitized thanks to the donations of John Q. Wikipedian and Sally B.
Artlover"), it might be much more financially successful in the short
to medium term than the copyright-and-license model.

-Sage