The problem is in sustaining the less used part of the collection, which from an archival standpoint and also ultimate cultural value is equally important. Normally, any such institution would expect to use the profits from the ones that sell most to support the others--[[The long tail]].
This is analogous to the principle that it is easy to finance a library of best-sellers--any town can do it, but only the very richest organizations can afford a library that includes everything that might be needed.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Yann Forgetyann@forget-me.net wrote:
geni wrote:
2009/7/18 Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net:
In the case of the NPG, it is quite clear that the cost of the digitalization is small compared with the potential benefit. There are people and organisations willing to pay to have a copy of these famous portraits. The issue is how to collect the funds without puting a copyright on the images. For this, we need a new business model. Think about how donations was raised to free up Blender.[1]
€100,000 is not a significant amount of money when dealing with trying to digitalize the various UK archives.
Comparing the amount raised for a single (quite obscure) software with what could be raised to digitalize world-famous works of art does not make sense.
Yann
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Bibliothèque libre http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l