Re: [Wikimediaau-l] Bringing the wiki model to digitisation
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Craig Franklin cr...@halo-17.net wrote: You mean like the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Project, which was the subject of a very interesting presentation at GLAM-WIKI? http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home It's not strictly Wiki-like, but it shares many characteristics of our model and promises to be a great resource down the track. I've not had a great look at the editing module itself, but changes/corrections seem to be live onto the site. The only thing that's not clear is the licence, while the papers themselves are pretty much all public domain, I can't see anything to confirm with certainty that the digitized text has been released as such. Yes, this licensing ambiguity is intentional as a result of internal wranglings at the National Library. It's a work in progress... What I thought that Stephen was referring more to was something akin to a Wikipedia loves art but instead of taking pictures of artwork in galleries, taking pictures of books in libraries (hence the WikiSource reference) and objects/paraphernalia in Archive collections. This is indeed a possibility but I think we are a couple of years away, just yet, from being allowed into archives and libraries to do our own digitisation. There are currently a lot of policy discussions going on in these institutions about digital access and who is allowed to do what with their stuff online. The traditional policies of you have to ask permission to use our content works very well when you are thinking about physical objects and making copies/studying them but it does not translate directly to the online environment. Furthermore, there is the legitimate concern that once their content gets out that it won't be respected or would lose its attribution and curation/historical interpretation information. This is quite apart from copyright concerns and has more to do with the curator's desire to see their collection's meaning respected. As such, and given the cultural sector is only just beginning to see free-culture folks as partners (rather than as cultural pirates and vandals) I don't think we're ready to be able to make big projects of the type described - just yet at least. What I would advocate is that we try to organise meetings with the local WIkimedians and the curators/staff of specific institutions just to chat about what they hope to achieve together. This could take the form of a lunch meeting or the form of a backstage pass tour or traditional Wiki-meetup. Once the relationship has been established - THEN - start talking about projects that could be undertaken. That's my 2cents at least :-) -Liam [[witty lama]] Cheers, Craig -Original Message- From: wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Bain Sent: Friday, 14 August 2009 1:04 AM To: Wikimedia-au Subject: [Wikimediaau-l] Bringing the wiki model to digitisation I unfortunately couldn't get to Canberra for GLAM-Wiki, though I've been reading the material online so far and am very much looking forward to the videos. One of the major discussion points coming out of it has been the ways in which these institutions offer - and should offer - digitised material. The costs of digitisation are a key factor driving institutions' desire to charge for certain usage of digitised content. The employees in the sector engaged in digitisation are a scarce resource too, which ultimately affects what material is made available online at all. My own use of archival collections for research has recently got me thinking: why don't we bring the wiki model to digitisation? The various state public archives all have facilities for users to purchase photocopies or scans of archival material, but some (certainly the archives in Victoria, NSW and Queensland) also allow users to take their own photos of material. Users are typically limited to using such photos only for personal or academic use, with permission for commercial use able to be requested, either from the archives itself or from the government agency responsible for the records. With a bit of organisation, I think it would be possible to set up a 'DIY digitisation' project for archival material, which would aim to produce digital copies of material at a quality level good enough to use for transcription at Wikisource. This would involve: 1) Identifying shortlists of material to target for digitisation. There is a wealth of material out there that would be of high value if made available generally to researchers but is currently a low priority for in-house digitisation. 2) Seeking permission for commercial reuse. With shortlists of material identified, this could be handled in bulk, reducing the burden on individual researchers. 3) Taking the photos and transcribing at Wikisource. As far as I am aware, all the various state archives are free to use (if you don't
Re: [Wikimediaau-l] Bringing the wiki model to digitisation
Are any of the GLAMs actually archiving their preciouss high-resolution scans *offsite*? - d. ___ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
Re: [Wikimediaau-l] Bringing the wiki model to digitisation
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Stephen Bainstephen.b...@gmail.com wrote: ... My own use of archival collections for research has recently got me thinking: why don't we bring the wiki model to digitisation? 3) Taking the photos and transcribing at Wikisource. As far as I am aware, all the various state archives are free to use (if you don't use the copying services) so all participants would need would be a camera and some spare time. Thoughts? ... In short, we dont need more content; we need more people. Even if contributors don't stick around on Wikisource, we need more people who have participated in one Wikisource digitisation project ... so that they have an appreciation of what Wikisource is doing. e.g. DarkFalls, Daniel, Giggy, privatemusings - these guys have all come over and done a bit of work, and can now evangelise. ;-) The core of the problem is that very few people are: 1) aware of Distributed Proofreaders and Wikisource, and especially the potential of Wikisource, 2) interested in transcribing PD works, or 3) competent in identifying PD works (i.e. copyright) Adminiship is a fairly good indicator of serious Wikisourcerors, as it is liberally granted to anyone who has significantly contributed to the project - e.g. I nom. people who have 1000 edits, no major issues, and have touched a few namespaces. I have successfully nominated Poetlister, an IP address, and a person who appears to not like responding to questions on their talk page. They have all done fairly well as admins. Most people accept RtbaAs (requests to be an admin :-) ) because anyone with 1000 edits has probably sat in despair watching a vandal go crazy when no admin is around to stop them. We have had vandals do there magic for hours. In 2007 and 2008, the vandals usually became bored before they were blocked by an admin or a steward was fetched. I watched that happen two or three times before deciding that it would be wrong for me to _not_ offer my services to be an admin. So we have very few non-admins-by-choice, and very few ex-admins. btw, Australians I count 7 Australian admins, of a total of 39 admins, so we are doing our fair share. ;-) The en.WS community is probably about 40-50 odd people 'strong' in a given month, excluding the people who pop in for a visit. Stats here: http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/Sitemap.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm We are gradually catching up to the output rate of Distributed Proofreaders, however that is largely due to the French and German projects. http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics The above charts show that there are plenty of pages in need of proofreading/validating. Our monthly proofreading project doesnt always finish a work in the month: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/WS:POTM An example of an Australian work scanned overseas: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:An_Australian_language_as_spoken_by_the_Awabakal.djvu In a few minutes we can import and initialise a djvu from Internet Archive ready for transcribing or OCR proofreading. Here is a list of the main ongoing transcription projects, most of which are barely started, and almost all of them are incomplete. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/WS:TP In summary, a large percentage of works are available at the Internet Archive. And if a work is not there now, it will properly turn up in a year or two. So it is more economical to focus on the works that are already on IA, except where a specific work is likely to bring in new contributors and readers. -- John Vandenberg (hopping of hobby horse...) ___ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
