The Paris Musées has published over 100k works under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, ensuring that even the digital editions stay in the public domain. At the same time they have published an application programming interface (API) for use in searching and retrieving high-definition, royalty-free images and their metadata.
Users can scroll through the collection via the museum's portal, discovering hidden gems like this photograph of French feminist Caroline Rémy and this beautiful illustration from an early edition of Les Misérables. This collection is a unique treasure trove for anyone interested in French history, art, and culture.
The Creative Commons Zero (CC0) is not the same as public domain but since some countries do not recognize a public domain, the CC0 license fills the gap. The CC0 waives all copyrights and related or neighboring rights in all jurisdictions worldwide. These rights also include certain moral rights to the extent waivable such as publicity or privacy rights, certain protections against unfair competition, and database rights and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of the data. In most cases, it would be wise to choose another CC license instead.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday January 16 2020, @06:17AM
I'll add that France's Academy of Sciences journals Comptes Rendus are open access, going back to 1835.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday January 16 2020, @09:12AM (1 child)
Of all the things against the Vatican, mainly pointed at christians who aren't, the easiest to say would be "why aren't you scanning invaluable unique stuff kept in your library?". Your boss said "everything I did I did in the open". Even if you found strange ideas in those manuscripts it is way worse if you keep it secret. We are in the information age and strange ideas abound, and there is no reason ancient people would not have their own strange ideas and try to publicize them. So what's holding them? Did they start scanning and nobody told anyone?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Thursday January 16 2020, @11:13AM
But they do digitize the archive, it's just somewhat of a really slow process. Since it's quite large, the documents are probably quite fragile and then of cause most people wouldn't be able to read them even if they wanted to since they don't read the languages (and a google translate just won't do). Then add that layer of embarrassment on top of it, they don't really like all the stuff coming out about nazis, jews, persecutions, slavery, aliens, satan, the apocalypse and what not. But they are apparently working on it.
http://www.archiviosegretovaticano.va/content/archiviosegretovaticano/en/attivita/ricerca-e-conservazione/acquisizioni-digitali.html [archiviosegretovaticano.va]
In Codice Ratio
http://www.inf.uniroma3.it/db/icr/ [uniroma3.it]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @01:02PM
This looks worth backing up. Not sure how big it is, but it should be fine to make a torrent out of the whole thing. Anyone dig deep enough to find out the full size?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 16 2020, @02:16PM
I hope this catches on more broadly. There's a huge store of knowledge locked up in the world's collections, much more than almost anyone realizes.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by nishi.b on Thursday January 16 2020, @02:52PM
I found there photos, paintings and engravings from the 19th century of my highschool (which did not change much since it was modified around 1860) and even a drawing from 1682 showing a celebration there.
I cannot even recognize the places I grew up in in Paris because the landscape changed so much.
For exemple la glacière in 1820 [paris.fr], and in 1901 [paris.fr] now looks like this [goo.gl].
It's really interesting seeing how humans transformed those places in just 200 years !