Hello Steve, I am from Seattle but live in New York these days. I think all of us in the Wikimedia community wish for a better process for digitizing paper media, storing it in Wikimedia projects, and categorizing it in a useful way. There have been efforts to do this but we lack standardization and some of the organizational infrastructure necessary. There are places in Seattle which have scanners set up to do this and if those places are not sufficiently accessible, then it would be possible to get equipment and set up in a community makerspace. To start digitizing content though several pieces have to come together. The usual outcome of digitization projects on Wikipedia is that a lot of media is uploaded then it is not sorted or used. To get the maximal value out of a project the digitization has to be paired with an immediate push to try to use the content, that why the project can be promoted and immediately measures can begin to note the impact. If you want to talk about the landscape of wiki-archiving then write me to talk by voice or video sometime, or just go to local wiki-meetings and talk to others. yours, On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 12:23 AM, Jason Moore <anotherbelieverwp(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane(a)bluerasberry.com

Hello group, Thanks to all who have written welcoming me, how nice! Hi Lane, Thanks for the note about how digitization projects have historically gone. I will take you up on the offer to talk about what you have seen by voice; I'll contact you offline from this thread. Hi Peaceray, Thanks for much for the lead on the Meetup group, that is very kind of you!! Unfortunately I can't make the Meetup tonight, but it's a great tip for the future, cheers! It sounds like the Labor Archives of Washington needs are in alignment with the idea I have for digitizing print content. And there are many other examples of archives, for example yesterday I read about the local Vietnamese newspaper "Dat Moi <http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2065403-08-datmoinewspaper.html> " from the 1970's. (Of course getting copyright release is an important step when it gets to commercial archival content.) The basic idea is to create a platform which would allow people to digitize + classify materials currently in print form like this: Scan print content > OCR it into digital form > proof accuracy + edit > add metadata > publish in a similar format as Wikipedia pages Different people can pick up different parts of the process once the page has been scanned. The Wikipedia process of review would be in place. In essence I would like to use the Wikipedia open-source platform + processes and swap out user-written content for scanned archival content as the start of the process. I am encouraged by the responses from this group; I can see I have found a supportive group to move the idea forward, thanks all! Steve Z From: Raymond Leonard [mailto:raymond.f.leonard.jr@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2015 11:09 To: Wikimedia Cascadia group mailing list; mailinglists(a)zitkovich.com Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Cascadia] Introduction by new group member Steve Zitkovich Steve, Hi! I have been meaning to respond to you, but have been swamped as of late. First, a totally non-Wikimedia resource. If, as a international product manager, you are looking for a tech connection, I recommend http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-DevOps-Meetup-Group/ They are meeting tonight, Tuesday, at 6:30pm at the offices at Whitepages <http://www.whitepages.com/> , details in the link the meetup.com link. During introductions, people get a chance to say whether they are looking to hire or looking for work. Usually there are folks from Microsoft & Amazon, sometimes Google, & a myriad of other organizations. Second, I am glad to hear about your interests in digitization. At our recent WikiWork <http://commons.lib.washington.edu/wikiwork> ! edit-a-thon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle/UW_Library_Special_Collections_edit-a-thon_4-25-2015> , Conor Casey, Archivist at the Labor Archives of Washington <http://guides.lib.washington.edu/content.php?pid=213382&sid=1775505> , spoke about what they have digitized & the volume of material still to be digitized. Perhaps one of the things that we need to focus on beyond edit-a-thons is how to best to digitize material & upload it to Commons in a coherent way.Certainly there are resources that we should be able to reach out to who have already coordinated with archives, albeit elsewhere than Seattle. Yours, Peaceray -- User:Peaceray <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Peaceray> peaceray(a)cascadia.wiki On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Lane Rasberry &lt;lane(a)bluerasberry.com&gt; wrote: Hello Steve, I am from Seattle but live in New York these days. I think all of us in the Wikimedia community wish for a better process for digitizing paper media, storing it in Wikimedia projects, and categorizing it in a useful way. There have been efforts to do this but we lack standardization and some of the organizational infrastructure necessary. There are places in Seattle which have scanners set up to do this and if those places are not sufficiently accessible, then it would be possible to get equipment and set up in a community makerspace. To start digitizing content though several pieces have to come together. The usual outcome of digitization projects on Wikipedia is that a lot of media is uploaded then it is not sorted or used. To get the maximal value out of a project the digitization has to be paired with an immediate push to try to use the content, that why the project can be promoted and immediately measures can begin to note the impact. If you want to talk about the landscape of wiki-archiving then write me to talk by voice or video sometime, or just go to local wiki-meetings and talk to others. yours, On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 12:23 AM, Jason Moore &lt;anotherbelieverwp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane(a)bluerasberry.com _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-Cascadia mailing list Wikimedia-Cascadia(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-cascadia