[Commons-l] Image donations?

Fri Jun 16 17:36:36 UTC 2006

Museums are good repositories of such information; also non-digitized
archives.  For them digitization is an expense; if we can reliably
offer this for free, many will be glad to release copyright in
exchange for more usable access to their own materials.

The Library of Congress has a sizable collection of materials that
they want to distribute more broadly; it is indeed already PD or
equivalent, but not digitized -- or more commonly, digitized somehow
but not in many formats, not classified, not easily available.

A commons-project to create form requests and a queue for processing
inbound content would be useful.

You could say the same about archived books that have no commercial
value anymore.  The same analysis goes for processing book materials
donated to wikisource; which requires image processing and OCR and
should perhaps have a commons aspect (raw page images, raw ocr output
files, images from within the book extracted from the raw page
images), and a wikisource text aspect (text transcript, translations).
 And again ties to the book industry would be useful here.

Finally, source texts that are educationally useful could generate a
third set of materials : living wikibooks built on their foundation,
updated and improved over time.

SJ
<copynig all 3 project lists>

On 6/15/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> I was wondering if there is some kind of organized effort to ask
> photographers and image agencies for donations (read: GFDL- or
> CC-licensing) of images.
>
> I am thinking especially of images that we cannot take ourselves; dead
> celebrities for example (and no, don't go grave-digging ;-)
>
> There must be a huge amount of photos that have next no no commercial
> value anymore, because they are not good enough for a magazine cover,
> but would do well for documenting an encyclopedia article. Of course, we
> would prominently credit the source in the image description (which will
> be transcluded to every wikipedia that uses it), or even in the image
> title. Images could be watermarked, of course, and for largeer amounts
> of photos, we'd create a category, gallery and all. Repeaded mentioning
> (in a good light!) in a project of the wikimedia magnitude might be
> worth more than paid advertisement, fo virtually no cost.
>
> We could even offer a service: I'm sure some of us have
> (semi-)professional film scanners (I do). Deal goes like this: mail us
> your films (encyclopedia/commons-style only; not your family picknick;-)
> and a note that releases them under GFDL/CC/PD/whatever, and we'll
> upload them in high-res on commons, where you can download them. Free
> film digitization!
>
>
> With people on commons obviously interested in media, there must be some
> of us with ties to "the industry" who can initiate such contacts. "The
> Yorck Project" already donated a lot of PD images, as you might
> remember. If we can get just a few photographers/companies to release
> images as well, others might follow just to not lag behind.
>
>
> Magnus
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-- 
++SJ