[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

Wed Nov 9 02:45:49 UTC 2005

Let's not forget the thousands of illustrations that we will now have 
access to as a result of this.

Tim Starling wrote:

>Brian wrote:
>  
>
>>For those who don't know, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is a famous
>>public domain encyclopedia, advertised as the "sum of all human
>>knowledge" in 1911.
>>
>>I recently (today) acquired a DVD containing scans of every page of the
>>1911 Britannica, along with index files for it all, organized by letter
>>and page number. I've already talked with avar, TimStarling, and brion
>>on IRC, and TimStarling specifically asked me to tell you all that he is
>>"confident that the server requirements will be minimal." They would set
>>up a domain name, generate some web pages automatically using the index
>>files, and host the entire set of 29,700 files totaling about 4 GB.
>>
>>One more thing, these are black and white TIFs, and there is discussion
>>about whether they should be mass converted to PNGs to be easily viewable.
>>    
>>
>
>A few notes on this: firstly it seems that the guy who made the scans has no
>intention of claiming any rights to them. He seems to be interested in
>disseminating the material widely, for religious reasons. His webpage is here:
>
>http://freierscientologe.netfirms.com/booksbritannica.htm
>
>The CD/DVD sets are apparently quite rare, Brian was lucky to get his hands
>on one at a fairly cheap price.
>
>There's the trademark issue -- Britannica may attempt to scare us with legal
>threats over this. A disclaimer on every HTML page declaring non-affiliation
>with Britannica would probably put us on sound legal footing, although I'd
>be willing to hear advice about this from people who are more knowledgeable.
>If the "LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia" (1911encyclopedia.org) can host
>this content, then we should be able to find a way too. And we can do it
>without the abominable license restrictions and "copyright traps" scattered
>throughout the work to enforce them.
>
>Wikipedia owes a lot to the 1911 edition -- we've copied many of its
>articles. A public, canonical copy will be a valuable tool to deal with
>LoveToKnow's frequent OCR errors, its incompleteness, and its specious legal
>threats against us based on our use of unspecified copyright material hidden
>in their doctored online copy. Hopefully the availability of page images
>will spur development of a complete and accurate OCR copy.
>
>The only question in my mind is the domain: should this be under
>eb1911.wikipedia.org? We could make it visually distinct, to avoid confusion
>with Wikipedia itself. Or would eb1911.wikimedia.org be better? Or
>eb1911.wikisource.org?
>
>-- Tim Starling
>
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>