phoebe ayers wrote:
If I had $100 mil to work with, or even a tenth of that, I'd want to set up a framework for coordinating current digitization, archiving and online content distribution projects. Such an organization could provide digitization support and expertise, hosting support, and lobbying and legal support for free licenses and free content. This organization could have as clients everyone from the Internet Archive to a random university library that has a collection of papers they're digitizing to the free Darwin project to... whatever. Like CNI ( http://www.cni.org/) the organization could help make connections between partners, but on a much larger scale. I've done research into what digital libraries and collections of free content exist, and it's truly unbelievable how many startup digitization and content-freeing projects there are out there, many of which are struggling for lack of money, manpower and expertise. Only by working with the people who have local expertise in what content is available where -- the librarians, archivists, copyright holders and government agencies of the world -- will these corners of excellent content be unearthed and made available to everyone.
Leave it to a librarian to make one of the most important suggestions. :-)
Big as Wikimedia may have become we cannot go it alone. We are part of a much wider world of people who believe in free and open access to knowledge. If another site makes a work freely available we don't need to copy it just so we can have it on our own database; that's the Borg's job. Enabling others to do as much as we do with a piece of work is just as valuable as doing it ourselves. A site that specializes in the works of Charles Dickens should be enabled to do everything about Dickens that we could do as long as it keeps its work free. If some other site includes the material, but makes free access difficult, I would be the last one to object to their being treated as competitors.
I have not made the kind of detailed study that Phoebe has, but I have certainly run into many, many other sites that offer free material. Some are not in economic peril, and have an established institution to back them. Others (like Google) may not have economic problems, but I am very mistrustful of their motives. Yet others are one person's labour of love. These are only as strong as that person's health and financial resources; they have no backup. One sign that would make me suspicios about the viability of such a site is the complete lack of edits for a significant time. A reasonable agreement with the last group would be to provide backup that is not publicly accessible for as long as they are keeping the site active. We coluld also make technical resources available to them.
Even huge digitization projects are plagued by the fact that they're often fighting a losing battle. For instance, the U.S. government has an ongoing project to archive online materials produced by government agencies, but still hundreds of thousands of documents a year go offline, disappear and are lost forever, mostly not through malice but through an inability to keep up. Project Gutenburg has been going on for years and there are still thousands of works that could be included. These projects, and more importantly much smaller and unknown ones besides, could do with support and help coordinating volunteer hours to expand the scope of current preservation efforts. Wikimedia, through providing the right framework, has achieved the seemingly impossible in five short years -- the world's largest reference work, plus a cultural movement to boot. Think about what developing an equally appropriate framework for content freeing and distribution efforts could do.
This too is important. There is too much for any one organization to handle, even one as large and with such deep pockets as the US Governent and its agencies. There are many smaller archives that completely lack the resources for digitizing their collections.
We need to seriously consider the implications of the cultural movement. That non-propritary approach to knowledge has yet to reach its potential for world-wide education.
Ec