Message: 9 Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:02:26 +0100 From: geni geniice@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] National Portrait Gallery To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: f80608430907171602h16a1bfe7n2e338bb49dbcfb19@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
2009/7/18 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no:
Sorry, I don't follow you on this one. If the existing business model don't work and it should be changed, then work with them to change it and make the alternate options viable.
John
We do not have the capacity to raise sufficient funds to make it a worthwhile business model.
-- geni ----- Put me in touch with instructors at art schools and I'll incorporate restoration into their curriculum. You'll be surprised how scaleable this is, particularly if we work out exhibition opportunities.
-Durova
2009/7/18 Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com:
Put me in touch with instructors at art schools and I'll incorporate restoration into their curriculum. You'll be surprised how scaleable this is, particularly if we work out exhibition opportunities.
-Durova
Restoration isn't the problem for the most part. The English part of the National Monuments Record contains about 10 million items (mostly photos I think). Wales and Scotland ad few million more.
That includes a fairly complete public domain aerial survey of the UK from the 1940s.
We do not have the capacity to support digitalization on that scale.
geni wrote:
2009/7/18 Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com:
Put me in touch with instructors at art schools and I'll incorporate restoration into their curriculum. You'll be surprised how scaleable this is, particularly if we work out exhibition opportunities.
-Durova
Restoration isn't the problem for the most part. The English part of the National Monuments Record contains about 10 million items (mostly photos I think). Wales and Scotland ad few million more.
That includes a fairly complete public domain aerial survey of the UK from the 1940s.
We do not have the capacity to support digitalization on that scale.
Well, who's your "we"?
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]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History
Yann
2009/7/18 Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net:
geni wrote:
2009/7/18 Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com:
Put me in touch with instructors at art schools and I'll incorporate restoration into their curriculum. You'll be surprised how scaleable this is, particularly if we work out exhibition opportunities.
-Durova
Restoration isn't the problem for the most part. The English part of the National Monuments Record contains about 10 million items (mostly photos I think). Wales and Scotland ad few million more.
That includes a fairly complete public domain aerial survey of the UK from the 1940s.
We do not have the capacity to support digitalization on that scale.
Well, who's your "we"?
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.
On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 10:19 AM, genigeniice@gmail.com 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.
The exact amount of money is beside the point. I think the business model analagous to Blender goes something like this:
A GLAM figures out the cost per item of its digitization project. Take that, add some modest figure for subsidizing the rest of the institution's activities, and that's the price for releasing any given reproduction. Anyone may contribute all or part of the price for releasing any given work. Once the full price has been reached, the scan is made available for free to anyone.
Maybe this would happen in lots, with the most popular/useful/valuable works digitized in the early lots with higher prices so that the capital investments get recouped early on. The next lot gets digitized once a certain threshold is reached with the previous one (e.g., the break-even point to finance the next lot). Maybe there are tiers for any given work:$X for 800px, $2X for 1600px, $4X for 3200px, etc. If the 1600px version is available already but you really need the 3200px version, you pay the difference of $2X and now the 3200px version is available for everyone.
The advantage of this scheme is that there are several groups who would be likely to help pay for the digitization: publishers who need hi-res versions and who would previously have paid for licensing; arts lovers who would be making donations anyway (and who can now point exactly to what their donation funded); free culture advocates. And if there is some way of recognizing the donors ("This portrait was digitized thanks to the donations of John Q. Wikipedian and Sally B. Artlover"), it might be much more financially successful in the short to medium term than the copyright-and-license model.
-Sage
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
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
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Forget direct funding, its not practical. The interesting thing is, we do have "sales organization" that is very important for GLAM-institutions, and it is probably so interesting that a conflict with us is simply to damaging. How do we turn this around to make it even more interesting for them?
Imagine this, if a gallery or museum has a painting of some "Leonard van der Olsen-Mozart" (he don't exist, hopefully..) then this museum should make sure there is a bio for the person and of his painting of "The fallen Madonna with the big bottom", and those should link back to the galleries own pages. At those pages the gallery should make available any high res copies, uv-scans, scientific works, etc, about the painting and the painter. We should be "the yellow pages for the GLAM-institutions". It should be so important for them to have a presence on Wikipedia that it should raise questions from the government if they don't have a sufficient presence.
Now, how do we make this possible? Forget direct funding, that is simply not interesting. Making the material available is interesting because this creates further use, not to forget visitors.
John
geni wrote:
2009/7/18 Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net:
geni wrote:
2009/7/18 Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com:
Put me in touch with instructors at art schools and I'll incorporate restoration into their curriculum. You'll be surprised how scaleable this is, particularly if we work out exhibition opportunities.
-Durova
Restoration isn't the problem for the most part. The English part of the National Monuments Record contains about 10 million items (mostly photos I think). Wales and Scotland ad few million more.
That includes a fairly complete public domain aerial survey of the UK from the 1940s.
We do not have the capacity to support digitalization on that scale.
Well, who's your "we"?
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.
2009/7/18 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no:
Imagine this, if a gallery or museum has a painting of some "Leonard van der Olsen-Mozart" (he don't exist, hopefully..) then this museum should make sure there is a bio for the person and of his painting of "The fallen Madonna with the big bottom", and those should link back to the galleries own pages. At those pages the gallery should make available any high res copies, uv-scans, scientific works, etc, about the painting and the painter. We should be "the yellow pages for the GLAM-institutions". It should be so important for them to have a presence on Wikipedia that it should raise questions from the government if they don't have a sufficient presence.
Giving galleries lots of links to their pages is something we should be happy to do, as it's informative, educational and helps the reader.
One of the many Freedom Of Information requests people have filed with the NPG in the past week (since this storm broke) is: what proportion of their web hits are from Wikipedia/Wikimedia?
- d.
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