[OpenGLAM] City Archives Amsterdam

Tue Jan 22 16:21:51 UTC 2013

Dear OpenGLAM list,

I would like to hear your opinion on the following.

The City Archives of Amsterdam has just published some great results of
their crowdsourcing project. Via the webpage velehanden.nl (many hands)
around 1600 volunteers have indexed more than 300000 archival records from
their militia register. The city archive had already scanned the records
and now with the help of the volunteers these can also be searched.
 (sidenote: the active volunteers could get points that they could spend to
access a digital copy for free)

At the same time, it is for me as a normal person not possible to get free
access to these records. I can now search very well (and I think I found a
record about my great-grandfather there) but I can not access the image
unless I pay 50 cents. The records are old enough to all be in the public
domain.

The reasoning of the city archive for the paywall is that that by selling
these scans, they have money for more digitisation efforts.

Now, this paywall goes against all of my 'open' feelings, especially now
the metadata has been crowdsourced and the images are PD. Still, finding
money for digitisation sure is a difficult task and new business models
still need to be found.

It just feels like such a shame to lock this great material and volunteer
effort away from the world, and think about the missed potential for
researchers..

Please share your thoughts. If possible, I will definitely adress them to
the persons responsible.

All the best,

-- 
Joris Pekel
Community Coordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org
http://twitter.com/jpekel
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