Hoi, Can I understand that this permission for using our content can be seen as a precedent for similar organisations like the Library of Congress.. organisations like the Koninklijke Bibliotheek .. ?? ( http://www.kb.nl/index-en.html ) Thanks, GerardM
On 7/15/06, Brad Patrick bradp.wmf@gmail.com wrote:
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@gmail.com 727-231-0101 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l