On 07/03/2008, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
The back rooms of museums in general are one of
the world's great
underutilized resources. Recently the Royal Ontario Museum managed to
find a skeleton of a T-Rex that it forgot it had. Ideally we should
have holographic images of every museum artifact in the world.
Commons does not support whatever Blender stores it's files as which
would be about the only open format for such data I can think of.
Getting access to the vaults of museums is an area where realistically
we need functioning chapters backed with some foundation influence..
Sure technically there are ways a private individual could get into
them but only limited areas and the amount you could so in a session
would be limited.
In any case we haven't finished mining what is on public display yet.
With the even standard digital camera getting better low light
capabilities working through the whole of say the [[Pitt Rivers
Museum]] could be an option if we could put together a large enough
party of wikipedians.
Other attack lines are university collections where we should be able
to find students at the university to get things moving (universities
may not like students taking an interest but there isn't much they can
do about it).
That's a more positive attitude! :-*
It's too easy to get discouraged by the enormous proportions of the
task. Large museums (like Pitt Rivers) are problematical because of the
amount of paperwork covering the artifacts. Small volunteer-run museums
are often in a desperate state because of a lack of resources and
expertise. They often can do little except watch items rot away before
their eyes. As a starting point they might be more amenable to a
win-win arrangement.
The Mormons are renowned for going to local churches and microfilming
parish records. Outsiders may view their motivations as peculiar, but
we cannot dismiss their contribution to record preservation.
Ec