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?
- d.
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 2:40 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com 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?
Maybe a little macabre, but for museums that ate going to be closed, how about giving each a "going away party" on location, including: * taking pictures of objects before they vanish in some storage never to see the light of day again * giving museum employees a Wikipedia introduction (talks and/or practical editing) * creating/expanding articles related to the museum's topics/objects, or at least making a high-profile "wanted topics" list
My aim here is not to plunder the poor museums, but to show them (and us) that not all is lost, and there are other people and places (like Wikipedia) to keep the topics alive.
Magnus
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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
Charles
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.
On 24/09/2010 18:29, geni wrote:
- 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.
Scenario: the world's leading museums are getting their act together, and putting together a subscription site where we'll have to go to explore their collections online. Top academic libraries will have to find the money. We want to put a counter-proposal, and have two strong cards to play:
* What they are doing will just perpetuate the argument against the nineteenth-century western collections, because it's the privileged who'll be able to access easily the site that documents them. * We have the Bates-Guffett Foundation lined up to finance an opening-up of at least images of the collections. * Point three - what is it? By some sort of lateral thinking compared to where we are now, we need to produce a concept, perhaps involving an independent curating body, microtransactions, fast remote loading, legal innovario ... whatever it is, images to appear in Wikipedia and other "free content" places as a type of "fair use", not involving the current premise that we need a local copy on our own servers under the licensing arrangement we use for everything else. Some practical arrangement that can produce sponsored public service usage of images of unique objects, without simply asking the museums to drop an income stream without compensation (see the thread title).
Charles
On 24 September 2010 17:42, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
- 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.
A licence that requires a 100kg brick be attached to every copy. Technically free, practically not.
- d.
On 24 September 2010 18:42, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 24 September 2010 17:42, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
- 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.
A licence that requires a 100kg brick be attached to every copy. Technically free, practically not.
- d.
Eh? Just attach the brick to an easy tear off corner and allow the person you are giving a copy to to remove it when they collect it. For digital copies just print a few bytes worth of data onto a brick and then reuse it. Requirement to attach a 50 carat diamond would present more of a problem.
First thing off the top of my head: get our GLAM contacts in order and ask them:
"We can't do political lobbying. But what can we do to help?"
It's reasonably clear that this is an ambit claim to see who kicks up a fuss - like when the BBC discovered people love 6 Music, and that their Asian Network demographic preferred 6 Music ;-)
So it strikes me as feasible that a fuss in the general name of the arts is reasonably within WMUK's charitable objectives and won't violate anyone's expectations of neutrality. It'll also be powerful signaling that Wikimedia are one of the few thoroughly Internet groups to actively work for the preservation of culture. (Much as, as Geni has noted, we're the only web 2.0 site to give a hoot about copyright.)
It will be worth remaining cognisant, of course, of the Iron Law of Institutions: we care about the collections themselves, the museum boards care about their power over the money per se and secondarily about what it's spent on.
But the first step remains: offer them our help and ask what we, as huge fans of museums and what they do, can do to help.
- d.
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