I’ve written before about the ideal for access to heritage digital images. In case you don’t recall I described it as follows:
Universal, scalable, trustworthy, sustainable, and permanent access to all heritage digital images from the publicly accessible to the privately held, including those from all museums and cultural institutions, archives and libraries, private collections, and publishers, using a system of organization that maximizes entry points and interconnections between objects and relevant texts, to facilitate retrieval for all imaginable purposes, through interfaces which have the capability of searching across all platforms, providing high resolution images, thumbnail browsing, copying and reuse for non-commercial purposes, and links to contextual materials, with continuously updated information of the applicability of worldwide copyright status and contact information for obtaining permissions.
While it is utopian, this ideal provides a context for looking at what exists, and what is evolving. Having an ideal toward which we strive is critical, even if entirely impractical at present. It seems to me that the steps that are being taken now should [click to continue…]
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