geni wrote: 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 -- 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

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 10:19 AM, geni<geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

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 Forget<yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote:

2009/7/18 John at Darkstar <vacuum(a)jeb.no>no>: 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.