Hi Ashwin,
One area where it does help being in London is photography. The V&A
has been very progressive about this, you can't use flash, or at least
not where there is a risk of damaging the artworks. But otherwise they
are quite open to photography of their own collection (special
exhibitions with visiting collections are another story).
So far we've barely started on
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Indian_sculpture_in_the_Victoria…
There are many more exhibits in the museum, including quite a lot from
India, and I hope we'll see many more photos loaded in the future. But
if you have any specific requests please do let us know, probably the
best place to post a request for photography is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_London
Bye for now, hope some of us will meet some of you in Haifa!
WereSpielChequers
On 20 July 2011 14:54, Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Just to update you on Tipu's Tiger, now that Fae
brought up the topic. User
Shyamal and I have been helping User:Johnbod, Fae and others in developing
Tipu's Tiger. The collaboration is successful and Tipu's Tiger has gone
much beyond the C- class article that was the version Tamil Wikipedians
translated to a GA nominee today with many new facts and images.
The surprising thing we learnt in this collaboration that despite just being
on the internet in India and never having been to England, much less the V&A
Museum, it was possible for us to contribute in so many ways - from finding
derivative works, and public domain images to adding facts and references.
The reasons for this were primarily that thanks to Shyamal's knowledge of
open resources we found historical material on the net and also to some
plain old grunt work churning through page after page of search results in
Google Web, Google Books, Google Scholar and Google Images.
All in all, collaborating with UK GLAM on this initiative was a very
positive experience that we recommend to others. In one sense, this
international collaboration is the defauilt mode for all editting in
Wikipedia and thus nothing really new - in another sense, it was an
interesting, purposeful and deliberate collaboration between Wikimedians all
over the world and the V&A Museum. We hope that this is just the first of
many such initiatives with the Victoria and Albert Museum, a museum which
holds many objects important to Indian heritage.
Our thanks and good wishes to our British colleagues for this venture.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------