The FMC Policy Summit starts today so I doubt I’m going to get caught up on anything for the next few days. If you’re interested, the Summit is being liveblogged here.
Category Archives: fair use/copyright
sanfran musictech
At SFmusictech today. sanfranmusictech
Not sure if that link will work. My blackberry is highly uncooperative today.
SanFran Music Tech
Registered for [tag]Brian Zisk’s[/tag] [tag]SanFran MusicTech Summit[/tag] and booked my plane tickets. I’m feeling a wee bit superstitious, Virgin America had amazing non-stop rates, at exactly the times and days I needed. And I snagged a seat with extra legroom both ways. (Especially good since, in addition to being as old and arthritic as a hound-dog, this is a redeye so as to get me back to DC in time for another event.
Sure, the weather could cause problems and SFO isn’t exactly known for on-time departures, but I’m not worried about that part. I’ve made the best effort I can to honor all of my commitments, that weather stuff is out of my hands and I’m not going to fret about it.
The Library of Congress Pilot Project on the Photographic Commons
Since I seem to be posting a lot about flickr these days, I thought I’d make a plug for The Commons:
Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection.
The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.
This project has actually been evolving for a long time. I used to hear a lot of negative opinions from independent researchers about the Library of Congress in general and specific doubts about whether the [tag]Prints and Photographs Online Catalog[/tag] would ever reach it’s full potential. It always seemed to me that what these individuals were really saying was, “this is going to be a lot of hard work and I want other people to do it for me and then let me use the results for free in the public domain.” Plus, none of them seemed to have a definition of full potential that was particularly broad in scope.
Although I am at times vocal in my critique of [tag]Wikipedia[/tag] and other communally produced information sources, I don’t see them as the end of civilization nor as the end for the need for experts, scientists or researchers. On the other hand, I don’t see them as the harbingers of a utopian tomorrow free of class and oppression and inequalities in access to information.
This particular Library of Congress undertaking was already envisioned as a highly sophisticated project when I first began following it’s development while I was in graduate school over ten years ago. Obviously, technologies like [tag]flickr[/tag] and concepts like [tag]folksonomic tagging[/tag] have radically altered the intellectual landscape for archivists of image collections and I believe those alterations will pose many challenges, but the results promise to be spectacular.