Activities/Proposals/Content access partnerships

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Content access partnerships

Outline

Working in collaboration with organisations that hold cultural, scholarly etc. archives that could be of benefit to the Wikimedia projects to release the material under free content licenses. This might include archived news stories (wikisource & wikipedia) or images (commons & wikipedia).

Benefits for the organisations involve free publicity, hits back to their websites where people could order, for instance full resolution prints of images, and verification of materials by the wiki community (e.g. checking descriptions for images)

Similar projects have been successfully completed by Wikimedia Deutschland:

  • 250,000 images from the Saxon State Library [1]
  • 100,000 images from the German Federal Archive [2]

See also the session at the Chapters meeting 2009

Leads we could follow up include:

  • BBC - see discussions at AGM
  • Dow Jones - Steve Virgin is standing for the 2009 Board
  • Leicestershire County Council - discussions are taking place re their Photo Digitisation Access Project (see [3])
  • etc.

Benefits

It releases large quantities of valuable content to the projects, and can increase the understanding of Wikipedia by large public organizations (and vice versa)

Financial requirements

<£200 to cover:

  • Telephone
  • Travel
  • Lunches

Volunteering

Mainly contacts with possible organisations.

Need organiser to coordinate efforts, identify leads and focus efforts. Mike Peel is happy to lead this.

Volunteers needed to sort and use the content when it's released.

Discussion

Funding was requested for this as part of the "Kick Start" grant application to the WMF here. Mike Peel 11:53, 27 June 2009 (UTC)