I agree, Wikisource should be more appealing for external GLAMs. A small thing we do at it.source is creating simple templates for "donated" books. Ex. https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Indice:Manuale_150_ricette_di_cucina_di_guerra.djvu
For the customized CSS, well, that's a general problem of MediaWiki, but also I'm not sure if Wikisource would love to have different layouts for different books. I think branding of a GLAM is important as far as the GLAM itself understands that Wikisource is a "common/public good", a "digital commons", and as you are probably aware the "spirit" of Wikimedia projects is pretty towards neutrality, anonimity, gratuity. Not saying that "branding" it's bad, but we wiki*edians are kinda sensitive about self-promotion. I think there's a bit of cultural clash here (but, again, IMHO): maybe it's a thing worth trying. Aubrey On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 4:06 PM, Ben Brumfield <[email protected]> wrote: > In a separate thread (sorry--digest mode bit me), Dominic wrote: > > Many cultural institutions are developing their own crowdsourced transcription > projects. I think Wikisource can be a much more robust platform than these > one-off projects, with a more well-developed community that aggregates the > transcription efforts of texts from many institutions in a single place > with a proven process. > > I'm a big fan of Wikisource, and have recommended it, but I don't think > that data extraction is the biggest barrier to adoption the GLAM sector > faces. Branding is a much, much bigger deal. I talked about this the ALA > this summer ( > http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com/2014/07/collaborative-digitization-at-ala-2014.html > -- see the slide with a screenshot of Wiksource next to one of Letters > 1916, which uses DIY History/Scripto as its platform): > > "The first one is is the French-language version of Wikisource. Wikisource > is a sister project to Wikipedia that was spun off around 2003 that allows > people to transcribe documents and do OCR correction both. This is being > used by the Departmental Archives of Alpes-Maritimes to transcribe a set of > journals > of episcopal visits > <http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:FRAD006_001J201.pdf>. The bishop in > the sixteenth century would go around and report on all the villages [in > his diocese], so there's all this local history, but it's also got some > difficult paleography. > > "So they're using Wikisource > <http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com/2012/04/french-departmental-archive-on.html>, > which is a great tool! It has all kinds of version control. It has ways to > track proofreading. It does an elegant job of putting together indiviual > pages into larger documents. But, do you see "Departmental Archives of > Alpes-Maritimes" on this page? No! You have no idea [who the institution > is]. Now, if they're using this internally, that may be fine -- it's a > powerful tool. > > "By contrast, look at the Letters of 1916 > <http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/diyhistory/>. [Three sentences inaudible.] > This is public engagement in a public-facing site. " > > There were a lot of nods in the room, and even more when I revisited the > slide in a crowdsourcing workshop a month later. > > If an institution were able to attach a custom stylesheet to pages > displaying its 'project', if it were able to send users to an attractive > homepage for its 'project', showing the project's materials, and recent > activity on them, with ways for admins to monitor their volunteers' > questions or discussions on talk pages, or announce news -- that would drop > that barrier to entry. At the moment, a GLAM that points its users to > Wikisource effectively 'loses' them -- they're sending them off to a > different community and a different site that just happens to contain > copies of the institution's material, with no easy way for the users to get > back to the institution. > > That said, think bulk export of transcripts would help, especially if > there were an easy way for the institution to match each transcript to the > identifier in its own system. Plaintext may be good enough for e.g. a > library that's using a CMS and just wants their docs to be searchable. > I've seen TEI recommended in the past, and while I'm a big fan, I suspect > it's of secondary importance. > > Ben > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikisource-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l > >
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