Thank you to the several of you who contacted me offlist about this.
Danny, mindspillage, gmaxwell, and I met in DC with the Library of Congress
folks who are responsible for the digital harvesting and web archival
functions. LoC is a big place, and the folks we met with coordinate a lot
of different elements.
One of the folks pulled out a folder which included a sheaf of the emails
that end up in OTRS. She passed one over to me and was explaining how the
curatorial folks are interested in including a specific page or set of pages
as part of a discrete topic, etc. and before she was done speaking I had
written at the bottom in large letters in a blue pen, "BLANKET PERMISSION
GRANTED" s/BP and all that.
That there would be a moment's hesitation to cooperate fully with the
Library of Congress is beyond my comprehension. I only regretted that we
hadn't had an opportunity to meet with them earlier.
Working with LoC will likely be a two-way street. They have 40 TB (that's
terabytes - 10 million items) of digital collection which is of great
interest to us. They also are interested in the full archival approach,
given what the projects have become as part of the American internet
phenomenon. How that will be accomplished is still being discussed and will
involve several different elements within LoC.
Part of the reason I took this job was to be able to sit across the table
from other organizations and do something for the betterment of the
projects. Largely, such ideas of working together has been stifled by a
simple lack of time and bandwidth from board members and Jimmy. I'm glad
that we are moving in this direction.
Oh, and we're going to get the whole digital archive of the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum too. =) Thanks to Danny Wool.
--
Brad Patrick
General Counsel & Interim Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
bradp.wmf(a)gmail.com
727-231-0101