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

Wed Nov 9 21:23:39 UTC 2005

Brian wrote:
> I recently (today) acquired a DVD containing scans of every page 
> of the 1911 Britannica, along with index files for it all, 
> [...]
> 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.

What is suddenly wrong with using Wikimedia Commons and 
Wikisource?  Why do you need a new domain and server just for this 
book?  Didn't you see
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work

> 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.

MediaWiki's image upload already does rescaling. All you need to 
do is to hack the TIFF-to-PNG conversion into MediaWiki and upload 
the original TIFFs to Wikimedia Commons.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/