... [T]here are the relics from the earlier age of photography, historical photographs that have been preserved in national libraries and archives or photo agencies and news media operations. Their relative scarcity alone can make them seem like treasures.
They ... are finding their way onto the Internet. ... [O]ver the last year there have been important new efforts to put these classics online, both to find new audiences for material typically used by researchers and to use those audiences to breathe new meaning into photographs from long ago.
Last month, in what is believed to be the largest donation online of “free” photographs — that is, unrestricted for commercial or noncommercial use — the German national archive uploaded nearly 100,000 historical photographs to the Wikimedia Commons, the virtual archive for material used in Wikipedia articles. ...
The photographs donated by the German archive have a lower resolution than what you would see in print (those still cost money), but are fine for online use. These lower-resolution photographs have been available at the archive site, although watermarked and with rules against commercial use (an unreasonable restriction by Wikipedia terms). The archive agreed to change, recognizing that the number of people who visit Wikipedia so dwarfs its own online visitor traffic. ...
The archive’s motives were not entirely selfless; it hopes to harness the Wikipedia editors to improve the cataloging of the photographs, said Oliver Sander, who is responsible for the collection at the archive. There are 58,000 people in these photographs who lack an ID number assigned by the German library, and the archive would like Wikipedia editors to help identify who is in these photographs and add these codes. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the capacity to implement this with our list of people,” Dr. Sander said. “Maybe Wikipedia members could add this ID to our list. That was the first benefit from Wikipedia.”
Thus far, 29,000 photographs of people have been so coded, Dr. Sander said.
In a similar move to harness the public’s knowledge about old photographs, the Library of Congress a year ago began adding photographs with no known restrictions to a Flickr service called the Commons. The Library of Congress started with 3,500 photos and adds 50 a week.
The project relies on Flickr’s ability to allow users to leave comments, below the picture or even within the picture to fill in the blanks. In a report assessing the project (conclusion: it has been a huge success) the library detailed the information that had been gleaned from Flickr users. ...
The Library of Congress photographs, in the first 24 hours of being posted last January, received 11,000 tags — ways of categorizing and connecting the photographs. ...
... In contrast to the Library of Congress addition of 50 photos a week, the German Federal Archive plans to add “a few thousand images a month”. The Commons:Bundesarchiv To Do list is also interesting reading. ...
I will say that the learning curve for classifying images within the Wikimedia Commons in general, and the Budesarchiv project in specific, is much higher than tagging images in the Flickr Commons. There is a handy CommonSense tool (available via the ‘find categories’ tab on any image) that will suggest categories based on keywords, but even that is a bit overwhelming for a beginner. ...
I am very curious to see comparison stats of the assignment of categories/tags to images in both the Flickr & Wikimedia Commons a year from now. How will we measure success? How will we grade the accuracy of metadata assigned by the public? Which images will get more public views and usage - those added to the Flickr Commons or those added to the Wikimedia Commons? ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 1/28/2009 11:31:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
