▲ 14 points
back
2 comments
I noticed one of the Related Content articles was regarding a picture collection from the Museum of Victoria, Australia.
I was was really impressed when I clicked through to find this museum provides a full API for accessing their content[1], and everything is at minimum Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.[2]
I'm sure some other museums already have something similar, but I wish even more would follow this lead.
A couple of anecdotes as a photographer, a part-German triple-citizen Wikipedian, someone who has scanned significant German photography of the same period, and someone who likes to read and access reference works but lives in China (where there are slim to no English language libraries).
The first example in the article is that of Germany. For some reason, a few years ago I helped to write the article on the Wa (a kind of native, long-distance voyaging canoe of Micronesia), and we found out there were full scale wa in the Berlin Museum of Ethnology. I've since even been to see them. Unfortunately, though we were able to find a German person to potentially volunteer to go take pictures of it, the rules in Germany are that you aren't allowed to publish images you take in the museum! This strikes me as "back-assward".
A second note on Australia. A friend of my father's in Sydney is a bit of a dilettante (he grew up playing in the WWII-era ruins of East London), and discovered that his elderly neighbor had a box full of glass plate photographs documenting in spectacular resolution previously unknown views of northern Sydney. He said that he planned to ask her to donate them to the State Library, but I implored him to first at least send scans to Wikipedia Commons, since they will be far more effective at making them both discoverable and generally available for scholarly research. This request fell on deaf ears. To date, I still haven't seen them.
That said, of course there are limitations to Wikimedia Commons, but it's not bad at all. I am personally in possession of approximately 16,000 postcards from around the 1900 period which I plan to host on their own website. Currently I have scanned something short of about 2000 of them. It's a hobby, I enjoy it, but the sorts of classification strategies, automation strategies and get-some-damn-money-back strategies I have do not permit a Wikimedia Commons compatible approach.
Also recently I visited the National Library of Spain in Madrid. I calmly explained that I had come from Australia and wanted to photograph some early images of pacific island watercraft from their library. They wouldn't even let me in, as I wasn't currently affiliated with a university, individual researchers were not allowed, and Wikipedia didn't cut it for them as a research institution. I was truly shocked - if I were Spanish I would have been livid.
Finally, I would like to point out that the resolution the scans are made at by a lot of libraries is PATHETIC. For example, check out some of the Japanese woodcuts evidenced in the East Asian section of the new MKG database. There is no way you can even read the text, eg. http://sammlungonline.mkg-hamburg.de/en/object/Aus-dem-Hakke...
How these people can spend years becoming supposed archivist librarians with digital chops and miss the damn point so clearly - not just on use, but more critically on maintaining the relevance of their entire class of institution to upcoming generations who increasingly don't give a damn (because they are fully aware they are hotbeds of backward anachronism) - never ceases to amaze me. As a researcher, it frustrates the hell out of me.