Talk:Macrogrants/The Open Digitisation Project

"following from the" seems to be orphaned at the bottom of one of the sections, I wonder if something has been missed here? The Land (talk) 11:41, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

That does seem to dangle so I've removed it. It was in the application forwarded to me as seen here. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 11:56, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Clarity

There is a lot written here, though I am left a bit unclear about what on this list of stuff the £2,000 worth of project developer would be doing. This would not be many paid days of work, so my assumption is that only a small sub-set of deliverables would be paid for by this grant. Perhaps a much shorter executive summary would help, along with the sub-list of outcomes the project developer would be using their paid time to produce? Thanks --Fæ (talk) 13:06, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Apologies if the application didn't make this clearer. The £2,000 from Wikimedia would be matched by an equal amount from FreeBMD and staff time from OKFN OpenGLAM. It would be very difficult to separate what exact deliverables would be funded by each organisation. A lot of the work will involve liaising with partners to gather information.

The key outcomes for the seed stage co-funded by Wikimedia would be:

1. Convert concept into a complete project plan.
2. Turn plan into funding applications.
3. Identify three likely funders and start application process (or leave ready to start)

Some important subtasks besides basic project development:

• Formalise a steering group. Engage with existing communities, such as GLAMwiki and OpenGLAM.
• Selection of two medium size partners: archive/library and gallery/museum.
• Scope solutions for key steps (imaging, data, storge, transcription, etc.)
• Define role for Wikimedia in the project. Commons to be used as repository. But also consider involvement of wider community, liking up with existing GLAM partnerships, etc.
• Prepare communications plan for next stage. Promote and support blogging by project partners.

--Javierruiz (talk) 14:56, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Excuse me, that I interfere. After two years of intensive cooperation with the Austrian Federal Monument Office - of which nine months digitizing the library - all original ideas have changed completely. If you want to limit the cooperatian just for digitizing the archive or scanning books, then you probably should hire a professional company with that. The basic problems I do not see in digitizing even not to get in contact with potential partners. I am now convinced that the biggest problem is, that you do not know exactly what you can do with the material you get.

I use 95% of my time for this project, reappraising the material for Commons and Wikipedia. The original plan was that I would be finished with the digitizing work within a maximum of one year. That would be possible only if I upload the unedited, unprepared raw scans, but I´am afraid, nobody will ever use it. I´am not able to check each individual scanned book for scanning errors. It is not possible to correct scan errors later by rescanning.

On the one hand we have a lack of authors. On the other hand, it is also true that the present authors are quite busy having care for their own projects.

In the meantime, we change our already long-term strategies in order to attract new authors. Even outside of Wikipedia itself. We focus on regional issues, just because the regional areas are not as well occupied by Wikipedians or newcomers.

To start a cooperation is the lesser problem. The real problems begin with the question: What should be the goal of a scan-project. A large amount of scans can not be the goal, because Google does is much better!

Some questions must first be answered:

1. What are the key elements, which can provide the cooperation partners and is there a need for it, to process it within Wikipedia.
2. Is there a significant group of authors, from which one can expect that they will actually use the scanned materials? At least partially?
3. Are there, in addition to the person who performs the scan, qualified people available who are willing to process the raw scans? Do they have a sufficiently powerful hardware? Do they have skills with Photoshop or Gimp on a semi-professional level?

I now have nine months experience with this scan-project in conjunction with Wikipedia. Embedded in an overall cooperation, which has been active for two years.

I draw the conclusion that without clarifying these preliminary issues a scanning project is endangered to fail. --Hubertl (talk) 16:13, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

• The target material is given as "cultural materials" which might include books, but sounds as if it extends beyond that. But more detail as to the intended targets would be good. What are the estimated costs of later stages of the project? Johnbod (talk) 15:41, 19 July 2013 (UTC)