On 1 August 2012 13:49, Fae faenwp@gmail.com wrote:
On 1 August 2012 13:29, Fae faenwp@gmail.com wrote:
Scanning and promoting the use of the images and text for the public benefit. Then selling the book at either little loss or a likely profit for the charity once we have a lot of public attention on it.
Slight amendment after thinking over a cup of tea - I would prefer to see it donated to the British Library (or some another worthy public archive) for the permanent public benefit, rather than resell. This fits better with the Wikimedia UK mission and the receiving institution might even help with archive quality digitization.
Much as I would like to say "we here at the BL would love you to pay for a new and exciting manuscript", I'm not sure this is the best approach for spending Chapter funds in terms of value returned. Grants for a third party to acquire material is a long way from the sort of thing we've supported before, and while I think you could just about argue it's inside our objectives, I personally have my doubts.
(Look at it another way: If an archive had come to us and said "we'd like you to fund digitisation of this book", we'd probably say yes at £250, maybe at £500, and start laughing if they said it would cost £5,000.)
The best model for cases like this would be to develop a method where we have an agreed partner who'll digitise culturally significant material at a reasonable cost (or a group who can do it in-house, but for material like this that's tricky) and a standing offer to fund it for certain classes of limited-availability material like this. We then approach the auctioneers or booksellers, talk them in to letting us have it for a day to scan it, and let them do as they will after that.
One risk here is that the digitisation would lower the marketable value of the final item, but I don't know how we'd quantify this one way or the other.