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