[OpenGLAM] City Archives Amsterdam

[Maarten Zeinstra]

Hi all,

The Amsterdam City Archives are famous for their locked down position on their cultural content. It frustrates me, mainly because they are government funded and their policy choices are still based on a analog world. The velehanden.nl (many hands) project disproportionally takes resources from the volunteers and gives only little back to that community. Although it is true that they remunerate their own volunteers by giving them a bit of access to their archive, that is not how volunteering works on the internet. Like open source development, Wikimedia projects, and the like the volunteer gives her/his time to a project to help better the world not one archive. It is not only their access policy that is still analog,  but also their community management and structure.

As Creative Commons Netherlands we've been in some talks with this institution, trying to show them that they are misunderstanding how the digital world works. We were unsuccessful. 

Talking about family history. I do like to celebrate and point your attention to an open dataset of genealogical information of the Leiden archive: http://translate.google.nl/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.opencultuurdata.nl%2Fwiki%2Fregionaal-archief-leiden-genealogische-data%2F

So if you are just a tiny bit Dutch check that dataset!

Cheers,

Maarten


On Jan 23, 2013, at 24:02 , Sarah Stierch <sarah.stierch at okfn.org> wrote:

> On 1/22/13 10:57 AM, Stefano Costa wrote:
> 
>> 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 :-)
> 
> 
> This is a good question. What does the archives "expect" the "buyer" to do with the content after they "purchase" it (so many quotes)! 
> 
> This reminds me of a little story: 
> 
> A about a year ago, a Wikimedian purchased a high resolution copy of Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (aka Whistler's Mother) and had it anonymously uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, where it is now a featured image and is used throughout numerous Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia. The image cost $500+ for the Wikimedian to purchase. He did this with a little extra money he had and asked the community for input about what images they'd like to see "freed". I was happy that this one was "freed" as it originally appeared on my list. He had to do this anonymously (his username is his real last name and it's quite unique, so he had to do this under a guise) and had someone else create a fake account and upload it. This is because it was against his "agreed" contract with Getty that he could not use the image outside of his original requested use claim and Getty could sue him for using it in unintended ways. (!?!!?!?!) 
> 
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whistlers_Mother_high_res.jpg
> 
> Enjoy mother, the high resolution is so beautiful that it brought tears to my eyes the first time I looked at it :) 
> 
> -Sarah
> 
> -- 
> Sarah Stierch
> US OpenGLAM Coordinator, Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://www.okfn.org
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