Digitisation projects undertaken by libraries, archives and museums aim at the precise and authentic representation of source material. Unfortunately the expense of these exacting standards has greatly limited the amount of digitisation achieved. Much more ‘digitisation’ has been undertaken by researchers and visitors themselves using digital cameras to make reference copies of material for personal use.

If shared, to what extent could these ersatz versions stand-in for the real thing? What are the collaborative, copyright and trust issues that might stand in the way?

If desirable, what kind of platform could enable this kind of sharing? E.g. A voluntary organisation, along the lines of the US “International Amateur Scanning League” http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/02/international-amateur-scanning.html or a website, like the hoard.it prototype, that “liberates” content from the websites of libraries, archives and museums to make it more accessible as semantic data.