From GLAM-WIKI: Finding the Common Ground

Comment by Liz Holcombe on August 6, 2009 at 1:59pm

We cannot afford to let the copyright issue stop us. There is some stuff we can put out there, we need to start with that and then progressively deal with the rest. It is so easy to get bogged down in problems and end up feeling overwhelmed, and not getting anywhere.

Comment by Lynda Kelly on August 6, 2009 at 3:50pm

Agree - we miss you Liz. Get better soon! There seems to be some groups working to resovle these issues. The NLA session has been outstanding and very thought provoking for me. Libabries are really questioning what their role needs to be in this world of instant knowledge and how to work with what's already available. They say it's about the readers, not the books.

Comment by Mia on August 6, 2009 at 8:46pm

If we're not going to let copyright stop us, we need to have serious conversations with our CEOs, trustees, governing boards, and funders large and small, because at the moment the 'commercial picture library as vital revenue stream' model is firmly entrenched and changes to copyright are seen as a challenge to that.

I know I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but here in the UK it seems that the technologists version of the MCG (museums computer group) and the IPR version (museums copyright group) have no common ground at all.

Comment by Lynda Kelly on August 7, 2009 at 10:01am

Senator Kate Lundy's speech opening Day 2 can be found here

Comment by Lynda Kelly on August 7, 2009 at 10:36am

More themes and thoughts:
* what business models should we be operating under - revenue raising may not be the way to go
* who are we doing it for - out of the education session we had rigorous discussion about this. I argued that we shoudl be focussing on the learner (ie the students) and not what we or teachers thought we should be doing

One point of discussion over dinner was what are we actually here for? What does Wikimedia community actually want from us (and us from them)? These may be answered today??

Comment by Lynda Kelly on August 7, 2009 at 11:21am

Key discussion: KPIs/ focus of institutions should be about access, not just revenue raising.

Comment by Liz Holcombe on August 7, 2009 at 3:12pm

Hi Lynda and thanks for your kind thoughts. I am on the mend, and I am cranky as hell I could not be at #GLAM-wiki. Oh well, thank goodness for Twitter, as at least I had a sense of what was happening.

I hope your question about what does Wikimedia want from us and we from them get an answer? I'd love to hear it.
On the business model idea - I really get bothered by the revenue raising thing, working as I do in an organisation which is publicly funded to do what we do. Yes, we also need to raise some revenue, but it does not seem to me that that is the only thing we do.
And I agree with you that we should be looking at what the learners (who are not, by the way, only school children) want to d - we can be making it easier for them to use our stuff, or at least the stuff that can be used. We have a lot of public domain material - surely we can be making efforts to make it easier to find, share, link to or embed (we should provide the mark-up to make it easier), and avoid the confusing sorts of statements (speaking for my own organisation here) that we have about copyright. I think that making things easier to use (more visible with clearer "rules") will help everyone - learners, teachers, the curious, even those who want to be entertained.

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