President of Russia: Dmitry Medvedev launches a project, which provides access to RIA Novosti’s photo archive

On June 23, 2011 the President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev took part in the launch of a new project “Eternal values” owned by the Russian International News Agency RIA Novosti. The project has already saw first 100 photos of the agency’s archive uploaded to Wikimedia Commons – an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files.

During his visit to RIA Novosti headquarters, which is celebrating its 70th foundation anniversary, Dmitry Medvedev pushed a symbolic button and uploaded to the Commons the last 100th photo from the agency’s archive.

RIA Novosti is a holder of exclusive rights to a unique archive of documents, photos and media files of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformbyuro) and “Novosti” Press Agency.

In order to eliminate digital divide, enhance access to historical and cultural values, the agency made a decision to open the most important and interesting sections of the archive and make them freely available to educational institutions, social media and Internet users. The project will run in stages.

The first topic-based block featuring 100 photos, which was uploaded on June 23, highlights the Great Patriotic War. June 22 saw 70th anniversary of the war’s outbreak.

By the end of the year the agency plans to upload 800 historical photos to the repository.

Materials of the RIA Novosti collection will be available to users under terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA). This license opens up wide opportunities for using content, including a chance to share it, change and use almost for any purpose within limitations of the right holder.

Wikimedia Commons – is a common centralized virtual repository of images, sounds, video and other multimedia files. From Wikimedia Commons, uploaded files can be used across all Wikimedia projects. They can be freely distributed, changed and used for any purposes (including commercial). It contains over 10 million files and grows as new files are added.

Dmitry Medvedev stressed that this is a very important project called to prevent the distortion of historical truth about war and ensure that the memory of the feat of Soviet soldiers does not fade with the time.

Participants of the meeting, held at RIA Novosti headquarters, touched upon issues on copyright on Internet, self-regulation of web environment, protection of human rights, responsibility for revealing damaging stories on Internet, the necessity to teach schoolchildren the basics of mass media.