!@!Re: [Upd-discuss] a longer term strategy for promoting the public domain?

[Lars Aronsson]

Hey David,

> Hello, Americans! "We Are The World" is just the name of a song.

Why don't you tell us what you are doing (be positive) instead of
telling us what others aren't doing?

Now, this requires me to tell what I am doing.

Within Project Runeberg, I try to digitize as much Scandinavian
literature as I can up to the life+70 limit (1933), so it will
eventually become obvious that this limit exists, that the bulk of the
20th century (1933-1993) is a dark era on the Internet, and that it is
dark because it is "covered" by copyright (think of it as a wet
blanket).

Among digitization projects in Europe (primarily Scandinavia and
Germany), I try (with little success so far) to promote the idea that
we should publish our scanned master images (high resolution TIFF)
openly without restrictions.  This doesn't happen today.  This would
allow others to do OCR on scanned pages that haven't yet been OCRed,
to present websites with better or different usability features, or to
submit the images to projects such as PGDP or the Internet Archive's
Bookmobile.  It would allow for a division of labour between those who
scan, those who OCR, those who proofread, and those who design
websites.  Today, every little digitization project tries to cover all
areas, and fails to master any of them.  Prestige and fear of the
unknown stops local digitization projects from releasing their source
images (their golden treasure) into the open, public domain.

Some public domain prints (+70) are digitized and pooled into
subscription services such as JSTOR and DigiZeitschriften.  Others are
made available free of charge, but only in reduced resolutions, not
suitable for printing or OCR (e.g. Making of America).  Some are made
available in high resolution, but only for "non-commercial" or other
limited purposes (e.g. Gallica).  There is no common culture of making
the sources *freely* available.  Such a culture is what I'd like to
establish.

I think we could learn some things from studying the "open access"  
movement of scientific publishing here, especially since local
university libraries are active both in OA and in digitization.  
First, OA has been very successful in getting media attention in the
last few years.  Instrumental components in this movement have been
the OAI-PMH protocol, the DOAJ directory of OA journals and articles,
Peter Suber's blog on the topic, and the ever preaching Stevan Harnad.
Second, there is a moral argument here:  University libraries demand
that scientific journals, articles and dissertations should be on the
Internet free of charge ("open access") because commercial journal
subscriptions are getting too expensive, but at the same time they
don't release their own scanned master images into the open.

I think a first step would be a website that lists digitization
projects that openly publish their source images.  This would require
a written standard or template license agreement that projects have to
comply with in order to be listed.  One way of making sure they comply
is to mirror their contents, but this would require a lot of disk, 
perhaps a suitable task for ibiblio or the Internet Archive?



Lars Aronsson.
-- 
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/