[Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Dream a little -- collaboration

If I had $100 mil to work with, or even a tenth of that, I'd want to set up a framework for coordinating current digitization, archiving and online content distribution projects. Such an organization could provide digitization support and expertise, hosting support, and lobbying and legal support for free licenses and free content. This organization could have as clients everyone from the Internet Archive to a random university library that has a collection of papers they're digitizing to the free Darwin project to... whatever. Like CNI ( http://www.cni.org/) the organization could help make connections between partners, but on a much larger scale. I've done research into what digital libraries and collections of free content exist, and it's truly unbelievable how many startup digitization and content-freeing projects there are out there, many of which are struggling for lack of money, manpower and expertise. Only by working with the people who have local expertise in what content is available where -- the librarians, archivists, copyright holders and government agencies of the world -- will these corners of excellent content be unearthed and made available to everyone. Even huge digitization projects are plagued by the fact that they're often fighting a losing battle. For instance, the U.S. government has an ongoing project to archive online materials produced by government agencies, but still hundreds of thousands of documents a year go offline, disappear and are lost forever, mostly not through malice but through an inability to keep up. Project Gutenburg has been going on for years and there are still thousands of works that could be included. These projects, and more importantly much smaller and unknown ones besides, could do with support and help coordinating volunteer hours to expand the scope of current preservation efforts. Wikimedia, through providing the right framework, has achieved the seemingly impossible in five short years -- the world's largest reference work, plus a cultural movement to boot. Think about what developing an equally appropriate framework for content freeing and distribution efforts could do. -- phoebe -- phoebe ayers | brassratgirl /at/ gmail.com | On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales < jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: