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