The images do look great.
With my Commonsist hat on, I have taken a quick surf around the Zoosphere website and there are a few thoughts:
1. The underpinning data would be a useful project for Wikidata. If Wikidata could slurp up the species details, then they can be used for taxonomy boxes on Wikipedia and (potentially) on Commons.
2. The website is not easily scrape-able. It would be a lot better if a Commons batch uploader had API access or similar to pull the metadata. It's a clumsy solution to retrospectively scrape data rather than retaining the same structures used to generate the web site.
3. Commons does not have a nice way of showing 360 degree photos. I have created animated gifs and created mini galleries for each image when there are image sets, when there were similar photo sets for objects. How this would work would need discussion and testing.
4. I am unsure of how large the collections will get. 2,000 images of the same species of fruit-fly would probably not be of great value for Commons and might "stress" Commons volunteers. If this is an issue then selection criteria would have to be worked out.
5. A collaborative project might be built-in as a possible workflow in Zoosphere. I'm sure that there will be many biologists that would like to release their photos immediately on Commons using default best practices, so that they can improve Wikipedia articles or Wikispecies without trying to find wiki-literate volunteers to do the same thing on their behalf.
I look forward to hearing more from Daniel. :-)
Fae
On 20 October 2015 at 00:06, Alex Stinson sadads@gmail.com wrote:
Hey Jen, I have added the cultural partners list which should be able to speedily answer the question about UK engagement and/or scrapping the images.
On Oct 19, 2015 6:20 PM, "Jen Dawson Cardelús" jen.cardelus@gmail.com wrote:
There's an awesome new project called Zoosphere that is taking high-resolution images of biological specimens and putting them online. This seems to be a project of the Berlin Natural History Museum, which is digitizing its insect collections, though I'm not entirely sure whether other museums are involved -- there are a number of logos at the bottom of the project website, but they may just be advisors/financial sponsors/etc. The images at Zoosphere include photos of type specimens and are pretty awesome. NYT coverage here. It appears that the images posted so far are CC-0, which is great.
I'm not sure exactly how Wikipedia/Commons could be involved in this besides scraping the content they upload and potentially encouraging them to continue using free licensing, but it might make sense to have a German Wikimedian contact them. Does anyone have German contacts that could be useful here?