Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-07/Editorial

A digital restoration

During the second half of 2009 the Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam has undertaken a pioneering partnership with WMF Netherlands. The Tropenmuseum is an anthropological museum with a focus on former Dutch colonies. The museum staff collaborated with Wikimedian volunteers to hold a physical space exhibit about the cultural history of Suriname. President Ronald Venetiaan of Suriname attended the exhibit. More recently the Tropenmuseum donated 35,000 images about Indonesia to Wikimedia Commons.

Late last month Gerard Meijssen of Open Progress asked me to look at one of the Tropenmuseum's first Indonesian uploads. Open Progress is a nonprofit that improves access to online information for people from developing countries. There wasn't much to see in that first file: 700 × 544 pixels, 92 KB. The sort of restoration work I do usually starts with a TIFF format file of at least 10MB. A very tight crop and damaged edges made it less than ideal to work with. Yet it was a rare type of image: a megalith that was being transported by human beings without motor vehicles or draft animals.

A few days later Gerard provided a 25 MB TIFF version and said that the museum staff had gotten a professional photographer to redigitize at high resolution, and I gave it my best shot. It's rare for a museum to share its resources this openly; our hope is to make the collaboration successful so that other institutions will follow the Tropenmuseum's example. So this is a digital survey of that restoration project, which took about 18 hours to complete.

This photograph was taken circa 1915 on the island of Nias. Reportedly, 525 people spent three days transporting the stone and erecting it in the village of Bawemataloeo to honor the passing of an important man.