geni wrote:
On 07/03/2008, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The back rooms of museums in general are one of the world's great underutilized resources. Recently the Royal Ontario Museum managed to find a skeleton of a T-Rex that it forgot it had. Ideally we should have holographic images of every museum artifact in the world.
Commons does not support whatever Blender stores it's files as which would be about the only open format for such data I can think of.
Getting access to the vaults of museums is an area where realistically we need functioning chapters backed with some foundation influence.. Sure technically there are ways a private individual could get into them but only limited areas and the amount you could so in a session would be limited.
In any case we haven't finished mining what is on public display yet. With the even standard digital camera getting better low light capabilities working through the whole of say the [[Pitt Rivers Museum]] could be an option if we could put together a large enough party of wikipedians.
Other attack lines are university collections where we should be able to find students at the university to get things moving (universities may not like students taking an interest but there isn't much they can do about it).
That's a more positive attitude! :-*
It's too easy to get discouraged by the enormous proportions of the task. Large museums (like Pitt Rivers) are problematical because of the amount of paperwork covering the artifacts. Small volunteer-run museums are often in a desperate state because of a lack of resources and expertise. They often can do little except watch items rot away before their eyes. As a starting point they might be more amenable to a win-win arrangement.
The Mormons are renowned for going to local churches and microfilming parish records. Outsiders may view their motivations as peculiar, but we cannot dismiss their contribution to record preservation.
Ec