On 24 September 2010 17:42, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
On 24/09/2010 14:40, David Gerard wrote:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/8021780/Quango-cuts-full...
Anything we can do within reason to help our dear friends in the museums?
The two things that occur to me, based on discussion with a curator after one of the British Museum bashes:
- Get informed about the internal debate in museums, which may even be
three-cornered (warehouse for objects with a few extreme-academic types treating it as research institute versus 19th century classical view as haunt of culture-vultures versus 21st century "young turk" what's-not-online-yet-is-in-danger-of-gangrene). We need to understand this and get in the "young turk" corner: go public-facing or you die.
I'm not sure we can. We will be seen as outsiders and in any case don't have many boots in the ground (In terms of active wikipedians in the UK we are probably smaller than the larger local history societies). What we can do is provide a way for people to put stuff online and have stuff done with it.
- Get the lawyers to find something splitting the difference between
CC-by-NC and CC-by-SA. The British Museum and other major institutions can live with non-commercial use of their stuff. We cannot. CC is therefore still too crude.
Such licenses exist (crown copyright would technically qualify). We can't use them and then tend to be legally messy. In practice when dealing with 3D collections we can generally produce pretty good results ourselves. Admittedly this takes time but the quality at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects
is improving.