It's rare for any speaker to draw a standing ovation from the OSCON audience, but that's what David Rumsey did last week. And Rumsey isn't one of the heroes of open source software. He's a philanthropist who collects historical maps, scans them at high resolution, and publishes them on the Internet as open content that anyone can access and repurpose. His motive is partly to connect many people to content that few would be able to view in a museum:
I thought about donating it to a university, but their libraries focus on preservation, they'd have put my collection in a vault and there would have been no access. Along comes the Internet, and I found we could do even more with the digital content than with the originals. We serve over 7000 visitors a day. A typical map library will serve 200 visitors a year.
[Jon's Radio]
