Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Gearing up

The Tropenmuseum is preparing for the upload of a selection of their collection to Commons. The aim is to upload images that relate to Indonesia. This is a huge collection estimated to be some 100.000 images.

This is a huge undertaking with many issues, to get a feel for the issues, the Tropenmuseum has decided to start with a much smaller collection, a collection about Suriname and slavery. There are several thousand images in this collection and, it coincides with a presentation on the subject.

A new issue is one of language; the annotations that go with this material is in Dutch. Some of the annotations have been translated into English and while the Tropenmuseum will welcome more translations, it does not have the capacity to provide these. The problem for Commons is that there are many museums in the world and it cannot expect them to provide all the categories in English.
Thanks,
GerardM

2 comments:

H-stt said...

The cooperations with the German Bundesarchiv and the Fotothek show that the national community can be motivated to catalog images. So the Dutch community is called to sort through the files and set the cats. There are tools available to support this job.

Anonymous said...

Very interesting. Will there be an official announcement soon?