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Dnia 25-03-2009 o godz. 15:05 Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com napisał(a):

Hello everybody,

it is with great joy and a certain amount of pride that I can announce a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Sächsische Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek in Dresden. The most visible part is that the SLUB is going to release 250.000 images under a free license (cc-by-sa) and that we will be uploading those images soon. In return, Wikimedia Germany is asking volunteers to help match person authority files from the SLUB, from Wikipedia and from the German National Archive, wherever possible. We also are going to evaluate how to geo-tag images. WM-DE and the SLUB are going to announce the details of this cooperation on a press conference in Berlin on March 31st, 2009.

This is the second time Wikimedia Germany was able to negotiate such a deal and we carefully analyzed the results from the first one with the German Federal Archive.

a) Public attention: Media interest was huge the first time and the feedback from Wikimedia users was even larger. The images were integrated into Wikipedia articles almost instantly and the differences before/after on certain topics are huge.

b) Licenses: cc-by-sa seems to be the preferred choice (when given the option between cc-by and cc-by-sa) at our partners, we also encourage them to do so. Out of 100.000 images from the German Federal Archive, a few had to be removed when it turned out that the Archive had thought to own enough rights of usages. These were honest mistakes that could be corrected quite easily. However, every time we negotiate, we urge our partners to check carefully whether they *REALLY* own enough rights of usage to release images under cc-by-sa. In this case, SLUB does understand copyright, they understand the implications of a free license and they accepted a clause in the cooperation agreement that again assures the legal status (..and indemnifies us).

c) Resolution. The German Federal Archive was willing to release image at max. 800 pixel on the larger side after 12 months of negotiation. The SLUB was initially unwilling to go beyond that. On the other hand, our fear was that 800 pixel might become a new "standard" on image liberation and we hesistated to agree to such a resolution. In the end, we found a compromise that could satiesfy everbody: The initial upload is going to be 800 pixel on the larger side. This resolution is fine for web usage and Wikipedia article integration but limits the applications outside Wikipedia, which we consider a disadvantage (some archives think otherwise). However, we are going to invite Wikimedia users to start writing a wish list of images from this set that will be submitted to the SLUB after half a year. The SLUB will then release images on this list at a higher resolution unless they come up with reasons to refuse to that. We are going to search for particulary important images or those which would hugely benefit from higher resolutions. With this two-step approach, we think that we successfully prevented the establishment of a 800pixel standard for content liberation. Time will tell if this assumption is correct and I urge anyone to become satisfied with scaled-down images whenever possible.

Again, we see that this kind of content liberation is facilitated the moment we are able to give something back to libraries and archives, something they would never be able to pay for. In this case, the matching service of authority files would drain their financial resources. Every other reason (karma, visibility, moral obligation, source of income) is helpful but not crucial. The Federal Archive says that after they released the images under cc-by-sa, the number of visitors has reached all-time highs, the number of people ordering printed copies from them has doubled. The Federal Archive is now asking its partner institutions to start negotiating with us about more image uploads, we will gladly do so.

We intend to continue this strategy as long as there is free hard drive space at Commons. If time permits, the focus might shift a bit towards helping to improve the meta-data situation at Wikipedia to make it even more attractive for these kinds of cooperations.

Mathias Schindler

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