On 17/08/2011 04:04, Fae wrote: <snip> > I welcome any feedback on how well these projects fulfil our mission > and how often our funds ought to be invested in these projects > compared to other projects which may have greater impact for new user > outreach or wider "e-volunteer" engagement. > Well, if WMUK got into this business (grant-provider for digitisation), I doubt there would be any shortage of things on which to spend money. My impression is that archives are full of documents that could usefully be put online. Further, experience at Wikisource suggests that proofreading is the bottleneck, rather than scanning. Of course that is also a comment on the cheap-and-cheerful scans that tend to be the freely-available ones.
So I would be in favour of a pilot, to see how it all goes. Criteria: on a medium scale; in a topic area that is rather clearly UK-centric, and of fairly general interest; and something that could be pointed to as an interesting use of money (not least for the OTRS mails that come in during the fundraiser). Visual content, not just text, helps for that, though myself I'm a text man. Do we have anyone around who knows enough about the NRA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Register_of_Archives) to give some sort of steer? I ask partly because of the existence of a Wikimedian in Residence at the NARA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Archives_and_Records_Administration) right now, who is posting to Wikisource about profile-raising things. It would be a help to know from someone informed how the "urgency" of getting archival material digitised is generally judged. What should be given priority? In other words, yes, look to spend some money in this direction; at the same time try to document what the aim is, in a way that would make sense to historians, librarians and archivists as well as our donors, and show compatibility with the WMUK mission. Charles _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
