Hi, Stephen, an interesting idea, and it is great to see that people who couldn't attend are thinking about GLAM related issues too.
I wonder, what are the GLAM standards for digitisation and archival? Can we find out what they are? My first guess is that they may be different to the standards required at Wikisource (is there a minimum requirement? is it specified?). 2009/8/14 Stephen Bain <[email protected]>: > 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. Hmm... There are a few concerns I guess GLAMs are likely to have: 1- Maintaining the original. Letting untrained people come in and handle their treasures is likely to freak them out. Esp. if you want to digitise something, it may mean it is the only extant copy of it, so the risk for damage may not be acceptable to them. 2- Quality of digitisation. My impression from a Museum 3.0 meetup in Melbourne a few weeks ago is that from their perspective, there is an awful lot to digitsation and archiving, more than just any man and his scanner, which they believe is the public perception. You mention later the limited stock of professional labour. There is some recognition, then, that being a professional archivist is more than just operating a scanner. They may feel the need to supervise, review or vet our work, meaning it is still not cost-free to them (and may cost more than getting a professional, while we are 'ramping up'.) 3- Variability of volunteers. Given there would still be significant effort on their part, I imagine they would be disappointed if volunteers ended up walking away (as volunteers retain the prerogative to do!). OTOH, while at GLAM-WIKI, one attendee shared an anecdote about how the director of the V&A museum in London put up all their collections information on the web "by fiat". All the curators were horrified at having their half-complete information made available, and they wanted to make sure everything was going through the various quality stages and all those kinds of things. But it went ahead and in the end, they saw that the sky didn't cave in, and it was OK for things not to be perfect before they went public. So I see some difficulties, but there are some interesting elements to consider. cheers, Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/ _______________________________________________ Wikimediaau-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
