[Opengenalliance] English school records project

[Javier Ruiz]

Hi Ben

I am ccing this to the Open Ge list to broaden the discussions.

You are right about the difficulties. The TNA more or less see the LIA as
income, but more importantly they care about not having to invest anything
and be able to claim to have moved materials online (just don't mention the
pay wall). There is a very good report on how it  works here:

http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability/case-studies/SCA_BMS_CaseStudy_NatArchives.pdf/view

We are arranging a meeting with their head of digitisation, who was in the
conference last week. We want to challenge their commercial approach but in
a positive and friendly manner with a solution based on participation. They
are actually very interested in crowdsourcing, but in parallel not as an
alternative to LIA.

You have done an amazing work researching the options for participatory
digitisation of the schools registers, thanks so much. Even if this
particular project does not happen in the end because of vested interests or
just lack of time /cash to organise it for the bid deadline, the development
of an open digitisation workflow is a very important element of opening up
the data. The conference last week was looking at upgrading some tools for
specific projects, so something will happen for sure.

We will contact The Internet Archive, although I am not sure they can help
with the scanning directly if we are in UK. Our initial view was that we
could build the scanning beds quite easily, as I send you in another email.

The side of hosting of images and API looks more interesting. There are a
few people in this list with connections to web resources, such as
Wikimedia, and hopefully they will chip in some ideas.

The indexing / transcription tool is where I think there is more work to do
and where you really have some unique insights. We hoped to build on and
develop under open source as much as possible so the tools remain accesible
for other projects and groups, rather than licensing for a specific project.
Of course that there are costs associated with this approach as well, and
it's great to have an initial estimate of effort. What is you view of
scripto.org? do you think it could be a good basis for structured texts?

We will not outsource the actual transcription as participation is a key
element throughout, although there are costs involved in
training, particularly for scanning.

The actual serving of the records has two sides. On the one hand people need
genealogical data integrated in searches and delivered consistently, rather
than scattered across zillions of websites, and this is one area I hope the
OGA can really make a difference one day. On the other hand, you could
develop a very rich experience of the particular record collection, schools
in this case, with extra material and an immersive experience possibly with
photos, lesson plans, stories by pupils, etc. It's not clear how much the
project would need to deliver on the public interface.

I will let you know how the meeting with GalaxyZoo goes and also about
concrete tool development plans by some partners.


best, javier
On 21 Apr 2011 15:27, "Ben Brumfield" <benwbrum at gmail.com> wrote:
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