[Foundation-l] National Portrait Gallery

[John at Darkstar]

Forget direct funding, its not practical. The interesting thing is, we
do have "sales organization" that is very important for
GLAM-institutions, and it is probably so interesting that a conflict
with us is simply to damaging. How do we turn this around to make it
even more interesting for them?

Imagine this, if a gallery or museum has a painting of some "Leonard van
der Olsen-Mozart" (he don't exist, hopefully..) then this museum should
make sure there is a bio for the person and of his painting of "The
fallen Madonna with the big bottom", and those should link back to the
galleries own pages. At those pages the gallery should make available
any high res copies, uv-scans, scientific works, etc, about the painting
and the painter. We should be "the yellow pages for the
GLAM-institutions". It should be so important for them to have a
presence on Wikipedia that it should raise questions from the government
if they don't have a sufficient presence.

Now, how do we make this possible? Forget direct funding, that is simply
not interesting. Making the material available is interesting because
this creates further use, not to forget visitors.

John

geni wrote:
> 2009/7/18 Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net>:
>> geni wrote:
>>> 2009/7/18 Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com>:
>>>> Put me in touch with instructors at art schools and I'll incorporate
>>>> restoration into their curriculum.  You'll be surprised how scaleable this
>>>> is, particularly if we work out exhibition opportunities.
>>>>
>>>> -Durova
>>> Restoration isn't the problem for the most part. The English part of
>>> the National Monuments Record contains about 10 million items (mostly
>>> photos I think). Wales and Scotland ad few million more.
>>>
>>> That includes a fairly complete public domain aerial survey of the UK
>>> from the 1940s.
>>>
>>> We do not have the capacity to support digitalization on that scale.
>> Well, who's your "we"?
>>
>> In the case of the NPG, it is quite clear that the cost of the
>> digitalization is small compared with the potential benefit.
>> There are people and organisations willing to pay to have a copy of
>> these famous portraits. The issue is how to collect the funds without
>> puting a copyright on the images. For this, we need a new business
>> model. Think about how donations was raised to free up Blender.[1]
>>
>> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History
> 
> €100,000 is not a significant amount of money when dealing with trying
> to digitalize the various UK archives.
> 
>