daniwo59(a)aol.com wrote:
As some of you may know, Brad and I were in DC for most
of this week, where
we werre joined by Mindspillage and NullC for some fascinating meetings with
people from the Smithsonian, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Library of
Congress, and the National Geographic Society. One of the primary purposes
of these meetings was to identify content that we can use for our projects,
including Wikisource. The meetings were very informative and productive.
This seems, in principal, to be a welcome development.
The Library of Congress meeting was also quite
spectacular. They also have
enormous archives which they are willing to share, but I am noting here that
some of their materials still fall under copyright so greater caution must be
exercised. Over the next few weeks, we will better identify what is there for
the taking.
During our talks, they made mention of the fact that many important
historical documents may have been scanned, but they have not yet been transcribed.
One of the repositories mentioned was the Thomas Jefferson archives at
Monticello. Speaking of this particular archive, they told us that the work was so
daunting that the Jefferson people (and other groups as well) have taken to
outsourcing the transcription work to India. I would like to suggest to the
current Wikisource team and additional volunteers that we jump at this
opportunity to help in the realtime preservation of these documents, which are of
enormous historical importance. My other suggestion is that we contact these
organizations in an organized manner, rather than as individuals, so that we
appear organized and do not duplicate efforts.
I realize that Jefferson was prolific, but it comes as a surprise that
this would never have been done before in the 180 years since his death
given that historically philosophically he is one of the most important
of US presidents. This kind of material needs to be available in two
formats. The digitized scans would be essentially uneditable to
preserve historical accuracy. Even scans modified to improve contrast,
or to eliminate foxing or chicory-cup stains are derivatives of this
stable corpus.
Transcriptions need to be subject to various hierarchies of
editability. Disputable readings of handwriting, links, references and
footnotes, translations, commentaries. It would be wise to establish
protocols to account for all of these possibilities.
You also mentioned the National Geographic Society in your
introduction. What is being offered there?
Finally, we have now contacted some of the most
important repositories of
content in the United States and we were welcomed by them. I encourage
Wikimedians in other countries, representing other languages, to make the same
coordinated effort with their local repositories in their respective languages.
Very much, though I think that much of this should be handled through
the national organizations and domains. Nationality is a more important
issue here than language. It is not unusual for countries to require
that funds raised through deductible charitable donations be expended
within that country. We also need to remember that the United States is
unusual in its policy of putting all of its documents in the public
domain. The kind of negotiation that may be needed to approach that
reality elsewhere may be more easily accomplished from within the country.
Ec