[OpenGLAM] City Archives Amsterdam

[Stefano Costa]

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Il 22/01/2013 18:21, Joris Pekel ha scritto:

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

Dear Joris,
I would like to add a few comments about this.

First, keep in mind that being in the public domain means that a work
is free of any restriction with regard to copyright. There may be
other rights for the holder or owner of a work (in this case, the
archive records). This is the case in Italy, for all items falling
under the broad definition of "cultural heritage" (unsurprisingly,
this includes archive records too), and reproduction of such works is
forbidden without explicit authorization.

- From a certain point of view, it is not so bad that crowd-sourcers
(does that word even exist?) get something tangible in return for
their effort rather than being free labor.

Second, I am curious about what you get exactly when paying 50 cents.
Is that a copy for your personal use only? Would you be able to
publish it e.g. on Wikimedia Commons, or circulate it in any way
without any restriction? If not, then I think it will be more
difficult to change the current situation. If instead you get an
unlimited license for 50 cents, the best thing may be to collect 150k
EUR and "buy" the whole lot, giving a few years of funding to the
project :-)

Related to the above is also a question of how much income they plan
to have from this scheme. I guesstimate it's going to be quite low,
e.g. around 5-10k EUR per year (that would make for 10-20k records
that are paid for).

Please note that I do realize the problems with digitisation and
curation of digital archives, and the fact that funds for both are
decreasing, and we especially lack "mainteinance mode" (i.e. most of
the times there are "digitisation projects" with unclear fate after
the end of the project).

Thanks for providing us with this info
steko
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