Hoi,
While it is nice when people may take pictures in museums, the pictures they take are not necessarily the best possible pictures. When you are talking about pictures taken in museums you will only get pictures of the objects that are in the exhibition areas. This is only a small percentage of what archives and museums hold and as many of the relevant objects are behind glass, the quality of snapshots will be sub standard.

What we need is cooperation with archives and museums. What we are looking for is high quality scans of images like they are provided by the Library of Congress. The availability of their high resolution tiff files resulted in hundreds of digital restorations many of them became featured pictures on Commons and Wikipedia. The upload of low resolution pictures and the cooperation with the Bundesarchiv has led to a lot of updates to the meta data held by the Bundesarchiv. The examples of these ground breaking examples make other museums like the Zuiderzee museum interested enough to be willing to talk. Relatively small museums and archives have their own charm and their cooperation is important because each collection contain unique works that can provide quality illustrations to our projects.

Collaboration with archives and museums should be our primary goal. Having people take snapshots is nice when it leads to involvement with the museums and archives.
Thanks,
       GerardM

2009/3/23 Eusebius <wikipedia@eusebius.fr>
Liam Wyatt a écrit :
> They have the professional technology to take the proper photographs
> in the first place so we should not be going around taking poor
> quality shots and thereby undermining them and getting them offside -
> it will hurt us in the long term and not improve our content much in
> the short term.
This is true only for the large museums which have the money to promote
every single work they have. I hope we're not going to discourage our
photographers from taking museum pictures :-)
> Please comment on this - could we have a template and associated
> category that says "this image is from a gallery's collection"?
Sounds better, although several templates (like "painting") say that
already. It would probably be interesting to modify them, or the
templates used to refer to well-known galleries (like "information
Louvre" or anything that could be used in the "gallery" field of the
painting template). I wonder whether it is possible to do that in a
discreet way.

Eusebius

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