Fæ would be my first suggestion for a mass upload if he is available and the collection is suitable. But reading through that link I'm not sure we can use that collection. Apparently it was started forty years ago by a curator who invited people to bring in historic photos and lend them to the museum to make a copy.
I'm sure that's fine for the Museum to use. But I wouldn't care to argue on Commons that this constitutes a CC-BY-SA 3 licence for all those images. Hopefully there will be a subset which can be dated early enough to argue PD. Maybe there are some where the rights owner can be traced, but I'd suspect there will be a lot of photographers from an era where some will have died long enough ago to make it difficult to trace the heirs, and others may even still be with us. At some point in the future no doubt we can import the lot, provided a digital copy is still extant.
Another reason why the movement needs a sealed repository from which stuff can be migrated when it is out of copyright.
Depending on the age range of the images and the quality of the metadata there could be a useful proportion that would be safe to upload. It all depends on the ratio of "my grandfather died in 1880 and left us this collection" to "my grandfather died in 1980 and left us this collection".
Hi all,
I have just spotted an announcement of a historic photograph digitisation project by the friends of the Somerset Life Museum Research Group (see https://somersetrurallifemuseum.org.uk/2016/10/13/digitisation-project/ ) aiming to digitise 15,000 images.
I have made an initial contact asking about licencing and sharing and mentioned “mass uploads” but I know very little about this. I believe there have been some people who have done this for/with other GLAMS and/or developed tools to handle this. Who would be the best person to put them in touch with if they come back to me and they are willing to release under a suitable licence?
Rod