[Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Kat Walsh]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Tim Starling<tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I tried to get a feeling for what sort of hard drive capacity we would
> need if the institutions in the room decided they wanted to share large
> amounts of content with us. Many of them have tens or hundreds of
> terabytes of data storage, in tape and hard drives. However, the bulk of
> this is in restoration-quality images (e.g. TIFFs tens of thousands of
> pixels wide), which they would not be willing to share with us even if
> we wanted them. Liam Wyatt proposed as a business model or compromise
> with management, the idea of sharing images of a 1000-2000 pixel width
> and charging a fee for access to the full resolution images. That seems
> like the most likely arrangement, and if so, it wouldn't need a
> significant change to our current capacity planning for file storage.
>
> A GLAM delegate expressed an opinion in question time that they would be
> reluctant to have us mirror their collection, since they've spent a
> large amount of money setting up their data storage, so mirroring would
> seem like a waste. Brianna Laugher was receptive to the idea of having
> Wikimedia projects hotlink or cache images from galleries. I kept quiet,
> the significant technical challenges with that approach were not discussed.

Thanks for the recap; sounds like the conference went pretty well.

I'm not sure what the technical challenges you had in mind are, but I
can think of plenty of reasons to argue against hotlinking and I don't
want to let the point slip by. A few:

1. What about our mirrors and forks and reusers; do they get the same
rights? How about users who want to download media dumps?

2. What about when they decide to change around their naming
schemes/take works offline/otherwise restructure their websites, and
us with millions of links? Any change of theirs would cause serious
disruption.

I don't think it is a waste for us to mirror those images unless you
want to call all redundancy a waste--but if it's really a concern,
from my perspective I'd far rather have them hotlink from us! I think
it is fine to provide links to the institutions' own sites where the
highest-resolution images are available for purchase, but I think we
must host the other images ourselves. I do want to see Wikimedia
collaborate and reach understanding with cultural institutions. But I
think it needs to be on the level of how we share their mission of
preserving and disseminating cultural knowledge, and showing them how
much more can happen when we are able to use that material
independently on the Wikimedia projects.

-Kat

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