User:Durova



High quality digital restorations promote free culture. Online access to free media is not yet on par with access to free texts. Premium restorations of historic material provide an incentive for cultural institutions to digitize their collections and share with the public. Great media leads to great articles: viewers engage with media content and want to provide context--media turns readers into editors.

The free culture movement assists cultural preservation. Large museums and libraries contain millions of items, some of which lack full documentation. Curators and librarians welcome assistance from the public to improve their records, such as the discovery that the Wounded Knee Massacre image contained human remains. Also, digital sharing is a layer of protection to prevent physical damage to cultural institutions from resulting in total loss. The recent Haitian earthquake caused severe damage to most of the government buildings in Haiti's capital. Problems can occur anywhere: last year the regional archives of Cologne, Germany suffered irreparable losses when the archive building suddenly collapsed. That type of loss is minimized when high resolution digital copies remain in multiple locations.

We can't count on this situation to improve passively: currently no industry technical standard exists for digitizing media. Many institutions have traditionally depended upon income from reproduction sales to cover part of their operating budget. Win-win solutions exist. See the following links for more information.
 * Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/Open letter
 * Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-07/Editorial
 * My blog

Why the name Durova?

Nadezhda Durova was the first female officer of the Russian army. She enlisted as a private during the Napoleonic Wars, was decorated in combat, and retired as a captain. More than two decades later she met Aleksandr Pushkin, who learned that she had kept a journal during her wartime service and encouraged her to publish her memoirs. In part because of her example, Russia and the USSR had the highest participation of female wartime combatants of any Allied nation during World War I and World War II.