I got an email from National Library in Norway and it has some interesting points. My comments are after the bulleted points. The bulleted points are my writeup from their comments, the original email was in Norwegian. Hopefully it is understandable.. :D
* Backlinks to the museums themselves is important, especially so the museums can serve high resolution images or alternate images.
Note that in this context there could be images with extremely high resolution, or processed images that could be part of some continued work. Imagine a 2D image of a viking helmet that really are a 3D scan, the 2D visualization is really a simplification and the 3D scan can be refined with new processing. The viking helmet is an example and is located at Kulturhistorisk museum.[1] Medium resolution images are by one source described as images in the range 800-1000px across longest axis. High resolution images could be 25Mpx and higher, one source was talking about 150Mpx. A 3D building scan combined with photographic textures could be very much more than this.[5]
This is also important for us, how can we tell our users that the museums can provide additional services? To post a template isn't very dynamic, yet it somehow solves the problem. What would be very interesting is to make some kind of API that makes it possible to get additional information directly from external sites. Probably something like this should go through a white list of some kind or be sufficiently laundered to make it safe in our environment.
* Send a message to a contact if a specific image is used on Wikipedia, probably also containing metadata.
This kind of service probably should be some kind of RSS feed with an additional option of en email notice. Probably it should be possible to follow a RSS feed for a whole category, like "Images from National Library of Norway" or "Photos by Axel Lindahl".[2] Such a RSS feed should probably be available in a daily or weekly digest mode. But what if there is some sub category, what should then be sent as a message - "This category and 1, 2, 3 levels below?"
* Geotag from Wikipedia should be available through Commons, and additional tools for adding geotags are important.
Probably geotags from Wikipedia should be available through some kind of API for Commons, but this should not be confused with geotags added to the actual image itself. Changes to the Geotags should be available through some kind of RSS feed too. It seems like tools to geotag an image through features in the image is important, but I don't know if it is feasible to do that today. I know about a few algorithms that can do this, at least if they have some clue about where the photo comes from. A wild guess "Norway" will most likely fail, but it isn't unlikely that a general area of a municipality and a few additional features like the location of a church and a couple of hilltops is sufficient. I know Riksantikvarsembetet in Sweden and ABM-utvikling in Norway have talked about this, so some interest definitely exist outside our community.
* Users should be able to give comments about an image or tag it, and this should be reported back to the owner. This should be independent of the use of the image at Wikipedia.
This I guess is two different thing. One thing is use of the image in mashups, use in blogs, etc. For now you has to transfer the image to be able to tag it on a blog, but what they say its interesting to get the actual tagging on Commons and then the image should be mashable. The other thing they talk about are comments on the image itself, which I guess is simply an RSS feed from the talk page. They make an example about Flckr.com, but I guess Expono.com is a better example. They said that the total information from a wiki are probably more interesting for them than Flickr.
Automatic tagging due to reuse is very interesting. How can we do this? It works like trackback in blogs, but would probably mean that we allow reuse of images through mashups. Imagine buttons like "post this on flckr" and similar sites, and make the information about where the image is reused available.
* They wonder how and if uncategorized images could be utilized somehow. They make an example of several thousand photos taken by a German soldier during WW2 in Norway, and this is about the only thing they know about the images.
Perhaps we need some statistics on usage of the uploaded archives from the German museums? Some of the images did not have sufficient information for localizing them, yet they were later located. One example is a photo from Mehavn. [3][4] I've been wondering if a service like Expono is better suited and that we can transfer images when there are something about them that makes them interesting for us. As long as we have no information it is difficult for us to utilize the image, but when we do utilize them we need to add a lot of information and that isn't easy to do in an external interface.
As a side note, what if we make a dirt simple interface for adding locations to images and then let the collaborative effort filter whats usable information? Its something like "add the name of the place" and only after more than one user adds the same name it shows up in a list of possible places, perhaps overruled by a list of known locations. Note that this should be done such that it doesn't create additional workload for administrators, and that more evolved comments could be placed on the discussion page.
* They wonder if an involved user would be interested in looking through the images.
I believe it is better to make the images available to the community because someone has the knowledge about the images. It is more likely that the user with knowledge about the images will find them, than for us to find the user with the knowledge. But if someone find a single photo of interest, how can we use that information to find other images of interest? I think it could be interesting to upload a bunch of images where we have very little prior knowledge and then do some research on how the images are utilized. Right now we have very little knowledge about how such images are used. A project that uploads images without any information and then let the community tag and use them will probably take several years before any usefull information is gained, - but even if the process is slow it will persist and there will be available information over time.
John Erling Blad /jeblad
[1]http://www.khm.uio.no/bilder/presse/bilder_yngrejernalder/Cf21675_7_C27317_H... [2]http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photos_from_Norwegian_Museum_of_C... [3]http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-102-0894-23,_N... [4]http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User%3AJerazol/Bundesarchiv_-_Norske_bilde... [5]http://niku.no/index.asp?strurl=//applications/system/publish/view/showObjec...