The brilliance of Flickr Commons and the public domain

Posted on 10 April 2008
Filed under Copyright, Libraries, Open content, Public domain
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Flickr’s The Commons is a really clever initiative.

Flickr gets high-value historical content (the kind of stuff that drives the long tail) and some nice publicity. The collections get to bring their content to many new users in a new way. Beyond access, the collections can also accrue tags, comments, and geo-tags, potentially adding a layer of valuable data. Since the photos are in the public domain (and marked as such), everyone has full re-use rights; there’s no threat of Flickr holding the collections hostage. (I don’t know whether the collections can mass-export all the associated data in a useful format, though. If not, The Commons is basically just a neat toy and not of archival value.) All around, it’s a great collaboration between for-profit and non-profit entities, where everybody wins, including the public.

The confluence of all this is maybe best demonstrated in this blog post by Australia’s Powerhouse Museum, the latest to join The Commons:

What Flickr offers the Powerhouse is an immediate large and broader audience for this content. And with this exposure we hope that we will have a strong driver to increase the cataloguing and digitisation of the remaining Tyrrell glass plate negatives as well as many more the previously hidden photographic collections of the Powerhouse.

In other words, projects like this create demand for more digitization of open content. Now that’s a comedy of the commons.

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Another contribution to the commons — this one’s a Spanish textbook

Posted on 11 January 2008
Filed under Personal, Public domain
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A book which I scanned has just been posted to Project Gutenberg, free (gratis and public domain) to the world. It’s a textbook for learning Spanish: Lecturas fáciles con ejercicios, by Lawrence Wilkins and Max Luria, from 1916. It’s Project Gutenberg etext #24250, and should be available here shortly; an HTML version is directly available here.

The book was my mother’s; I think she got it during high school or college, when she took several Spanish classes. I started the project and submitted it for copyright clearance, and I scanned the text, which was then OCR‘ed by Distributed Proofreaders member Alicia Williams, proofread and processed by DP volunteers, shepherded by Chuck Greif. I also scanned the images (pictures and maps) that appear in the HTML version of the etext.

Most of the credit is due to the wonderful projects, Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders, which make possible this and many other valuable contributions to the commons.

This isn’t my first involvement with Project Gutenberg, as I wrote on my LiveJournal last year, and it hopefully won’t be my last.

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