Hoi, This is not about the NPG, it is about relations with GLAM in general. What we aim to do; inform people with the knowledge of the world takes many illustrations. Small sized versions of the NPG material is publicly available. The issue is that material that is not available in a high resolution was lifted. High resiolution material does not really help us satisfy our need to illustrate our projects that much more then lower resolution material does.
While I am all in favour of getting as much material available in as high a quality as possible I do think rip and run is not in our best interest. For every image we see on the website of a GLAM there are typically many more that are not on the website. I would argue that when an organisation like the London based National Portrait Gallery is not willing to collaborate with us, we should not make a point of that as there are so many other GLAM that do want to collaborate with us. We can have their low resolution images without this kind of controversy and our objectives are as well served by them.
So please, let us focus on all those organisations that want to partner with us and by making that a success provide the NPG with arguments why it is in their best interest to partner with us. The good thing is that it will give us time to absorb material. We need to do justice to the material that we get, check the annotations and integrate it in our projects. When we do this well, the NPG would benefit from partnering with us and, we would equally benefit from such a partnership. Thanks, GerardM
2009/7/12 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no
This is important; is it possible to get some kind of agreement with the NPG and what will it cost us? Some museums are willing to support our mission, but we can't just assume that they are in a possition to accept every rip-off from their web sites and other publications.
John
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, I am saddened about the current situation about the National Portrait Gallery and the high resolution pictures that were lifted from its
website.
The problem that I have is in the vocabulary used, it paints the NPG as
our
enemy and we are to use pitch forks and fiery speeches to make them aware
of
our displeasure and our wish to fight. It is sad because it is exactly
the
kind of rhetoric that may damage our budding relations with GLAM in for instance the Netherlands. (GLAM is galleries libraries archives museums).
There is much happening in the Netherlands when it comes to the
collections
of GLAM. There are limited subsidies for digitising material and this is happening. Much of the material becomes available on the Internet. We are talking and have been talking for many months about sharing and using our digital heritage on Commons and Wikipedia. There have been talks with national organisations and individual museums. There are many powerful arguments why we want to partner with GLAM.
- we need many illustrations for our Wikipedias and we want to have a
choice of illustrations for all our Wikipedias
- it is important that we have provenance for our illustrations, not
just
for copyright reasons but particularly to prove the value as an
illustration
- photoshop or gimp can give a picture a whole new meaning
- by partnering with GLAM we open their world to our communities, Wiki
loves art is one project that shows that we can
- by prartnering with GLAM we gain in respectability
Recently I have been blogging about our budding relation with the Tropen museum. We are looking at an initial upload of some 100.000 illustrations that are of particular relevance to our Indonesian projects. These illustrations will become available at a similar resolution as the ones
of
the Bundesarchiv. They will be old photos and other flat techniques but
also
photos of three dimensional objects. We are talking on how we can grow
the
relation in the future. We talked about releasing high resolution scans
of
material that needs restoration, we talked about their object of the
month
project..
There are two other GLAM that we are talking to at the moment. They are
as
relevant as the Tropen musuem. I am fearful about the development of our relation with them and with the development of the national
organisations. I
am saddened because I fear that it will now be not as easy to develop all these relations. Thanks, GerardM _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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