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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 worri
by 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 agoBy 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 agoYeah, 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 agoYou 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 agoVast 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.
- icebraining 13y agoSure, but what about using both?