#TED and an EUREKA moment for Open Content

Archimedes is one of the best known Greek scientists. People learn his principle in school and are often able to quote it for the rest of their life. When we write articles in Wikipedia, sources are considered to be important. This TED presentation reveals how little we actually know. How little or how badly we can refer to the past, how little we truly understand the relevance of even people like Archimedes.

When you have an interest in sources and in the preservation of knowledge, you will love this presentation. When you are looking for arguments why museums, archives, libraries should make their research, their digital scans available to the public under a free license, you should watch this presentation completely.

When you are involved in GLAM and Wikimedia projects, at the end of this presentation you may come to an understanding why it is so important to acknowledge the museums, the archives, the libraries for their work they do on the works we refer to.  Yes, much of what they conserve is out of copyright but they provide the provenance to much of our material past. A past that brings the original artefacts to where the digital manipulation / re-use takes off. It is where our digital world connects to the physical world. It is where the sharing of the sum of all knowledge has its origin, its sources.

These sources may provide us with even more knowledge as our ability to research objects increases. What we do not know is what material to value. The prayer book featured in this video was technically a "write off" and now provides us with a single source to works of ancient Greece we did not know about.
Thanks,
     GerardM