5 ms·

Great, but why should the British Library, a non-profit charity and UK taxpayer assisted institution put these images on the servers of a US based for-profit co

• jamesbritt 13y ago
  [B]ut there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution. Would that have been more cost effective?
• cobrausn 13y ago
  The first few lines in the article mention that the bulk of the work was done by Microsoft in digitizing the photos.
• smtddr 13y ago
  I'm of the mindset that developing a home-grown/in-house solution when there are time-tested & proven solutions out there is generally a mistake unless you're trying to innovate and offer it to the public. I worked at a place where the devs thought apache2, django, rails, etc. were too slow so they made their own web-server re-implementing the whole HTTP 1.1 protocol from scratch....
  • simplemath 13y ago
    oh god, that sounds... excruciating
  • PavlovsCat 13y ago
    There is rarely an existing solution for your specific needs. And sometimes, at some point it becomes more work to tweak an existing thing into what you want it to be, than just do it from scratch. Yes, you can't always know that beforehand, but that doesn't mean it's always safer to err on the side of taking something off the shelve. That said, seeing how the images are creative commons licensed, it would still make sense to put them on flickr, too :P The more, the merrier.
  • 7952 13y ago
    A UK government agency tried to release wartime aerial photos for free on the web and it was a disaster because the site was always overwhelmed with traffic. Now you can only get those photos by paying. This story could easily get picked up by a large news organisation and it needs to be hosted on something with lots of capacity.
• ceejayoz 13y ago
  > Great, but why should the British Library, a non-profit charity and UK taxpayer assisted institution put these images on the servers of a US based for-profit company? Why shouldn't they? It's to everyone's benefit for these to be as widely distributed as reasonably possible. > There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution. These folks can now use the Flickr API to download each and every one of the photos and code to their hearts' content.
  • revscat 13y ago
    > Why shouldn't they? It's to everyone's benefit for these to be as widely distributed as reasonably possible Because Flickr could one day be shut down, and eventually will be, however far on the future that may be. For resources like this such a disruption will be painful. I'm not saying it is a bad idea, only that I understand the long-term hesitation in this.
    • parfe 13y ago
      How would a nonprofit service be any more insulted from shutting down some day? They made the data available. You could personally choose to re-host it using an endowment to fund it for a century. They're happy seeing it immediately and reliably accessible.
      • _delirium 13y ago
        I generally trust the long-term stability/accessibility of libraries and archives more than I do something like Flickr. Even if it's not shut down, Flickr could well limit API access or do any number of other things. IMO the U.S. Library of Congress does it right. They do actually have a Flickr page, for people who prefer that interface: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/ But there is also the canonical digital archive at: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
    • yapcguy 13y ago
• timClicks 13y ago
  You're speaking there as a tech-informed taxpayer who is being slightly nationalistic. Most taxpayers, even if they agree with you, are likely to be more worried by the prospect of the British Library developing its own tools for access to its digital collections when perfectly adequately ones already exist. By leveraging Flickr, the library frees itself of the problems of dealing with tens of millions of users attempting to access its material. Memory institutions have centuries of experience dealing with the lone, dedicated researcher. They're less used to dealing with massive number of researchers accessing collections at the same time.
  • icebraining 13y ago
    By leveraging Flickr, the library frees itself of the problems of dealing with tens of millions of users attempting to access its material. We already have an open and free technology for that: Bittorrent.
    • mseebach 13y ago
      Yeah, that's totally reasonable. Just tell people to torrent a couple of terabytes, then sift through the pictures on their hard drive, using only the file system to guide them. The hardware cost is probably several hundred pounds and the download should take about two weeks if they've got a good broadband connection. But, hey, you cut out the evil evil American company Flickr (boo), so everybody's better off.
      • icebraining 13y ago
        You shouldn't assume I necessarily agree with the condemnation against using Flickr just from what I wrote; it's not an approach conducible to good debate. My opinion is that Bittorrent would be a good technology for the purpose, since it freed the organization from the distribution problem without being tied to a third-party service. But I have nothing against also using Flickr, on the contrary. As PavlovsCat wrote, the more the merrier.
    • rmc 13y ago
      Vast majority of the population do not have the knowledge to use that. Surely it's good to spread the history and these documents as far as possible. Putting requirements and barriers like "you must use bit torrent" excludes people.
• vidarh 13y ago
  To make them more readily available. Their job is to preserve and provide access to them. The images are in the public domain (donated by Microsoft who did the scanning, by the way) - if any UK based programmers want to do something with them, they can.
• lovemenot 13y ago
  Over the years, there have been many instances of short-sighted technology selection by publically funded British institutions. However, I don't think this is such a case. That these documents are going into the public domain means Flickr can assert no rights over them.　If Flickr is able to profit from hosting them then competitors will surely do so too. Meanwhile, this will cost the Library nothing to implement or operate. They can just rehost if and when Yahoo! Flickrs out. Developing against the Flickr API presents the usual risks to third-parties, but that need not be the concern of the Library.
• AlexMuir 13y ago
  Brightsolid is a Dundee-based company that has digitised quite a bit of British library material as a sort of public-private partnership. For example, the British Newspaper Archive - http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ I'm of two minds as to whether this has been a good thing. On one hand it's digitised content that was previously only in paper form, but on the other that content is now charged for, and likely will remain so for a long time due to contracts. Effectively it has been put back into copyright. Flickr is a perfectly reasonable tool for the job.
• capnrefsmmat 13y ago
  Why not Wikimedia Commons? Several major museums and libraries (including the US's National Archives) have donated major collections.
  • chris_wot 13y ago
    Wikimedia Commons could quite easily download them and store them on their servers.