That's an interesting point. I haven't been to the exhibition myself yet, though I wonder if there was a comparable image on Commons.
Awareness of Commons as a resource is important especially amongst those who decide on the content of exhibitions. Progress is being made and you can find some images from Commons in places such as the Reading Museum and the English Heritage website. Perhaps it would be worth establishing the level of awareness of Commons amongst heritage professionals.
On Fri, 4 Jan 2019, 12:24 Fæ <faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Finally got around to visiting the Ashurbanipal exhibition at the British Museum.[1] The exhibition is near first class.[2] If you are in London, treat yourself. The use of light projection to help illustrate the ancient friezes was smart, and done in a way that still let you examine the original objects in their normal state.
I was taken aback when I realised that at the start of the exhibition, the delightful twenty foot across print of a panorama of a modern location in Iraq was sourced to Alamy.[3] Later in the exhibition, the modern location photographs I noticed were sourced to Alamy with credits to the photographer. Considering how much impact the Wiki Loves Monuments projects have had over recent years,[4] it is a shame that long established GLAM partners of our Wikimedia projects like the BM, still appear to prefer the ease of commercial stock photography libraries, rather than finding and trusting free images from Commons, or thinking of asking our Community for assistance if high quality photographs of historical locations are missing from our free collections, and might help future exhibitions.
Does the UK chapter have any plans to do more to promote GLAM reuse of our free archives, or to bang the drum a bit more in GLAM journals where this happens successfully?
# Links and footnotes
- https://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/ashurbanipal.aspx
- The convention of style over technical precision seems the norm.
Failing to include accession numbers on descriptions, a lack of seating and displaying the fantastic library of cuneiform tablets in a case ten foot high and with no useful labels at all, tend to be considered bold choices rather than anything the museum wants to improve 3. The technical photographer within me noticed the slight focus anomalies, possibly due to the way software joins were done, and avoidable with either a far more expensive camera with panoramic features, or by stacking a much larger number of multiple shots 4. https://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
Thanks Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk