Many of the individuals who are interfacing with museums, libraries, and other arvhives know this already. For any who may not, here's something you can bring to the table along with an offer.
WMF has a growing pool of volunteer editors who will do high quality restorations of historic photographs, lithographs, etc. as a courtesy for the institutions who release bulk material to WMF instead of Flickr. Certain technical and esthetic limitations apply; if any difficulties arise I would gladly to the restoration personally, in order to facilitate negotiations.
Bear in mind, for example, the prewar illustration of Dresden, Germany
before:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dresden_photochrom.jpg
after:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dresden_photochrom2.jpg
This restoration was done in thanks to the University of Dresden library for their generous promise to donate a quarter million images directly to Wikimedia Commons. Many images of similar quality are already available for North America, Europe, and the Near East. I would *gladly* perform similar restorations in support of negotiations to open new sources to WMF.
To editors who are communicting and/or negotiating with such archives, please contact me at your earliest convenience. I will do all that is possible to demonstrate the advantages of releasing media content to the WMF environment. If this means courtesy restorations, they will be prioritized.
Warmest regards,
Durova
On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 9:50 PM, foundation-l-request@lists.wikimedia.orgwrote:
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Today's Topics:
- I'm a creative commoner!!! (Domas Mituzas)
- NYTimes article: Exploring Fact City (KillerChihuahua)
- Re: NYTimes article: Exploring Fact City (David Gerard)
- Re: NYTimes article: Exploring Fact City (The Cunctator)
- Re: NYTimes article: Exploring Fact City (David Gerard)
- Considerations for museums and archives to gain their cooperation (Gerard Meijssen)
- Re: Considerations for museums and archives to gain their cooperation (Milos Rancic)
- Re: Considerations for museums and archives to gain their cooperation (Milos Rancic)
- Re: I'm a creative commoner!!! (Brian)
Message: 1 Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:34:18 +0300 From: Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com Subject: [Foundation-l] I'm a creative commoner!!! To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 79327CBB-B84D-4EDC-9B8F-29D5D80990FC@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed; delsp=yes
Originally I wrote it somewhere on a blog ( http://dammit.lt/2009/03/28/im-a-creative-commoner/ ), so this is a bit long copy-paste into an email: Lately Creative Commons is becoming very dominant topic in my life. First of all, I see all the people in free culture world holding their breath and waiting for Wikipedia switch to CC license. I?m waiting for that too - and personally I really endorse it. Though usually people do not really notice licenses on web content, they really do once they see something they really want to reuse. Wikipedia ends up being isolated island, if it doesn?t go after sharing and exchanging information with other projects.
It takes time to understand one is ?creative commoner?. I do have a t- shirt with such caption, but it is much more comfortable once you start feeling real power of use and reuse of information. Few anecdotes?
Dear Mr. Mituzas,
Thank you for making your photographs available under a Creative Commons license. I am writing to inform you that the American Society of Civil Engineers has featured a silhouette of ?Up we go? on the cover of its new book, ?Constructability Concepts and Practice.? https://www.asce.org/bookstore/book.cfm?book=7742
Per the terms of the license, the following credit appears on page ii of the book: ?Front cover photograph by Domas Mituzas used under a Creative Commons license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.?
I will be happy to send a copy of the book to you if you will provide me your mailing address.
I got this email back in summer, 2007. Did I just steal a job from professional photographer? Or would they just leave blank book cover? Will this lead to a better bridge in future? Did I join a civil cause? All I know now, is that I?m book cover photographer, albeit quite cheap one. Also, by using CC license I simply used lingua-franca of world I?m in - and now my content can evolve into shapes that I couldn?t expect, and that would be limited by non-portable licenses.
Other anecdote is way more internal. I have cheap point-and-shoot camera (same one to shoot book cover pictures :) that I use during my travels. It fits well into my jeans pocket, it doesn?t provide me any self esteem in professional photography. Still, I get to places, I take pictures, I place them on my flickr photostream, and I license them under creative commons. And fascinating things happen - my pictures appear on top of Wikipedia articles (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings_in_the_world ), without any intervention of mine. People just use it, I can sit back, relax, and see how the contribution widens.
Of course, there other different stories. My colleague (and manager) runs a wiki about his own town, Bielepedia, and he wants to exchange information with Wikipedia. Now he can?t, as well as quite a lot of other free content community projects. Though of course, some may believe license difference doesn?t mean much, in this case it means that we?re building borders we don?t need nor we have intent to maintain.
I live and breathe Wikipedia technology, but I do not feel competent enough to go and push content itself around, and it just shows up there itself (oh, of course, there?s army of committed volunteers who help with that). So, I benefit the project just by being creative commoner, and I may benefit lots of other projects. We at Wikipedia technical team are very open in what we do, and try to spread our know- how in many directions. Documents I wrote about how we do things ended up downloaded hundred thousand times, and I really hope that some of that know-how will end up used and reused.
I guess I?m taking this to extremes - I ended up talking to people in government of Lithuania, journalists and non-profit activists. Imagine a government, that would commit to open licensing for produced content. Well, no need to imagine - US federal institutions release information to public domain, but in Europe it is way more restricted. Still, what one has to realize - at government level it is not only a right to be given, it also has to be a right that has to be protected. Nowadays that means going to copyright powerhouses that serve large record labels and movie studios, and will charge for services, that government has to provide for free (and does in other areas, like looking for your stolen car).
We have lots and lots of talks about knowledge-societies at government levels, but we never get to the point, that every individual is part of that, and first of all we have to teach those rights, and guard them. But of course, to prove, that our rights have to be guarded, we have to show how great our work is - and how powerful can our sharing be. To achieve that we have to build bridges between license islands, talk same languages, and of course, create.
I?m a creative commoner. So should be you.
P.S. So should be Wikimedia Foundation. I?m extremely excited about the work being done to make it reality (thanks Erik, Mike, Mako, everyone!), and you know my personal position on the matter by now :)
Cheers,
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]
Message: 2 Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:02:12 -0400 From: KillerChihuahua puppy@KillerChihuahua.com Subject: [Foundation-l] NYTimes article: Exploring Fact City To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 49CFC5B4.7020108@KillerChihuahua.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
This is a lovely article, by a reporter who actually doesn't seem to be on a smear campaign or completely misunderstand how Wikipedia works - altho its unclear how much of that is due to reading "The Wikipedia Revolution".
Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29cohen.html?ref=technology
Message: 3 Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:04:22 +0000 From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] NYTimes article: Exploring Fact City To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: fbad4e140903291204v7076d3baj178c850c1564146b@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
2009/3/29 KillerChihuahua puppy@killerchihuahua.com:
This is a lovely article, by a reporter who actually doesn't seem to be on a smear campaign or completely misunderstand how Wikipedia works - altho its unclear how much of that is due to reading "The Wikipedia Revolution". Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29cohen.html?ref=technology
Noam Cohen is pretty au fait with Wikipedia and how it works.
(In general, I'm really glad Wikipedia is utterly mainstream and gets coverage outside the ad-banner trolls of the tech press.)
- d.
Message: 4 Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:07:55 -0400 From: The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] NYTimes article: Exploring Fact City To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: dfd0b40903291207s473963d6h20524878615e6e74@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
A lovely article. The only pity is it doesn't note how much of this social theory of wikis owes to Sunir Shah's pioneering work on MeatballWiki.
On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 3:02 PM, KillerChihuahua puppy@killerchihuahua.comwrote:
This is a lovely article, by a reporter who actually doesn't seem to be on a smear campaign or completely misunderstand how Wikipedia works - altho its unclear how much of that is due to reading "The Wikipedia Revolution".
Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29cohen.html?ref=technology
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Message: 5 Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:14:30 +0000 From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] NYTimes article: Exploring Fact City To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: fbad4e140903291214pb5c7216sbd1fd87c8a474a83@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
2009/3/29 The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com:
A lovely article. The only pity is it doesn't note how much of this
social
theory of wikis owes to Sunir Shah's pioneering work on MeatballWiki.
MeatballWiki is all but unknown to most Wikipedians, let alone the outside world. That's not good. I recommend it to all here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeatballWiki http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl
Think of it as meta-meta-wiki.
- d.
Message: 6 Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:35:00 +0200 From: Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com Subject: [Foundation-l] Considerations for museums and archives to gain their cooperation To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Message-ID: 41a006820903291535w481cd65ftcdf796c994602ead@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Hoi. I am talking to a few museums and archives and several of them are interested in considering Commons for their collection. At the same time they are also considering Flickr.
The issue they have with Commons is its restrictions. One of the museums said it like this: "We have done our best to ascertain the copyright status of much of our material. We have not been able to find the original copyright holder or someone who inherited these rights. When we post our material to Flickr, we just remove the material when a copyright holder turns up and asks us to. Doing it in any other way requires much more effort. Effort that we rather spend in more productive endeavours like digitising and annotating."
My question is, will it be acceptable when a museum or archive provides us with their material and when we learn about a request to take down material, we do this when requested by the copyright holder. This is not considered an issue with Flickr !! Thanks, GerardM
Message: 7 Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:50:49 +0200 From: Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Considerations for museums and archives to gain their cooperation To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 846221520903292050h70c4faf8s153556e987d98f66@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 12:35 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
I am talking to a few museums and archives and several of them are interested in considering Commons for their collection. At the same time they are also considering Flickr.
The issue they have with Commons is its restrictions. One of the museums said it like this: "We have done our best to ascertain the copyright
status
of much of our material. We have not been ?able to find the original copyright holder or someone who inherited these rights. When we post our material to Flickr, we just remove the material when a copyright holder turns up and asks us to. Doing it in any other way requires much more effort. Effort that we rather spend in more productive endeavours like digitising and annotating."
My question is, will it be acceptable when a museum or archive provides
us
with their material and when we learn about a request to take down
material,
we do this when requested by the copyright holder. ?This is not
considered
an issue with Flickr !!
Once again, if we have non-free.wikimedia.org repository, with precise rules, we wouldn't be able to have all kinds of materials which policy of Commons prohibits:
- Orphan works.
- Somewhat more flexible conditions for the situations like you mentioned.
- Logos and other trademarks at one place.
- Strictly defined fair use images (like on en.wp) at one place.
Message: 8 Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:51:53 +0200 From: Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Considerations for museums and archives to gain their cooperation To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 846221520903292051ubdd299gdd1d014e11d94712@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 5:50 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Once again, if we have non-free.wikimedia.org repository, with precise rules, we wouldn't be able to have all kinds of materials which policy of Commons prohibits:
... we would be able to have some kinds...
Message: 9 Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:50:02 -0600 From: Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] I'm a creative commoner!!! To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 9839a05c0903292150q487b1ec6s2671c227bab7fb02@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
I was surprised last year to receive an e-mail from the journal Nature Genetics. They put one of my pictures that they found on Commons on the cover of the journal. I've received a couple of other similar but lower profile requests. Commons is definitely a great way to get your work seen.
On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists@gmail.com
wrote:
I got this email back in summer, 2007. Did I just steal a job from professional photographer? Or would they just leave blank book cover? Will this lead to a better bridge in future? Did I join a civil cause? All I know now, is that I?m book cover photographer, albeit quite cheap one. Also, by using CC license I simply used lingua-franca of world I?m in - and now my content can evolve into shapes that I couldn?t expect, and that would be limited by non-portable licenses.
Other anecdote is way more internal. I have cheap point-and-shoot camera (same one to shoot book cover pictures :) that I use during my travels. It fits well into my jeans pocket, it doesn?t provide me any self esteem in professional photography. Still, I get to places, I take pictures, I place them on my flickr photostream, and I license them under creative commons. And fascinating things happen - my pictures appear on top of Wikipedia articles (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings_in_the_world ), without any intervention of mine. People just use it, I can sit back, relax, and see how the contribution widens.
Of course, there other different stories. My colleague (and manager) runs a wiki about his own town, Bielepedia, and he wants to exchange information with Wikipedia. Now he can?t, as well as quite a lot of other free content community projects. Though of course, some may believe license difference doesn?t mean much, in this case it means that we?re building borders we don?t need nor we have intent to maintain.
I live and breathe Wikipedia technology, but I do not feel competent enough to go and push content itself around, and it just shows up there itself (oh, of course, there?s army of committed volunteers who help with that). So, I benefit the project just by being creative commoner, and I may benefit lots of other projects. We at Wikipedia technical team are very open in what we do, and try to spread our know- how in many directions. Documents I wrote about how we do things ended up downloaded hundred thousand times, and I really hope that some of that know-how will end up used and reused.
I guess I?m taking this to extremes - I ended up talking to people in government of Lithuania, journalists and non-profit activists. Imagine a government, that would commit to open licensing for produced content. Well, no need to imagine - US federal institutions release information to public domain, but in Europe it is way more restricted. Still, what one has to realize - at government level it is not only a right to be given, it also has to be a right that has to be protected. Nowadays that means going to copyright powerhouses that serve large record labels and movie studios, and will charge for services, that government has to provide for free (and does in other areas, like looking for your stolen car).
We have lots and lots of talks about knowledge-societies at government levels, but we never get to the point, that every individual is part of that, and first of all we have to teach those rights, and guard them. But of course, to prove, that our rights have to be guarded, we have to show how great our work is - and how powerful can our sharing be. To achieve that we have to build bridges between license islands, talk same languages, and of course, create.
I?m a creative commoner. So should be you.
P.S. So should be Wikimedia Foundation. I?m extremely excited about the work being done to make it reality (thanks Erik, Mike, Mako, everyone!), and you know my personal position on the matter by now :)
Cheers,
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]
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