Metropolitan Museum of Art Waives Copyright

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Derek Churchill

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk, 1868-1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Image: CC0)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has dramatically expanded its commitment to Open Access. On Facebook Live this morning, Director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell announced that the Met would make 375,000 images of public domain artworks in its collection freely available for unrestricted use through its new Open Access Policy. This effectively supplants the Met’s earlier Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) and Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) programs, which limited their scope to academic and non-commercial uses. The Met’s images may now be used freely for any purposes, including commercial ones. As always in questions of copyright, this policy applies only to images of artworks which are themselves in the public domain, so most modern and contemporary art is excluded.

Images that are covered by the Open Access Policy are marked on the Met’s website with a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) symbol, meaning that the Museum has waived copyright and dedicated these images to the public domain. Artstor, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons–all of which partnered with the Met on this initiative–will also be making these images available on their own sites.

With this new policy, the Met becomes only the second American institution (after the Walters Art Museum) to adopt the generous CC0 designation for its images. It is by far the largest art museum yet to have embraced such a sweeping vision of open access.

Embedded Metadata in Artstor

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Derek Churchill

Click to enlarge

An update to the Artstor Digital Library was released earlier this week, so you may have noticed a few differences in the way its interface now looks and acts.

Perhaps most significantly, you’ll see that downloading an image from Artstor now gives you just one file, not two. In the past, downloads produced two similarly named files on your computer: an image file (ending with the extension “.jpg”) and an associated metadata file (ending with “.html”). And ever since Artstor dropped Java three years ago, these two files have come to you as a single zip file, which required you to go through the additional (and annoying) step of “unzipping” the file first.

Artstor’s solution to the problem of having to juggle two different files for each download–plus dealing with those wildly unpopular zip files–has been to give you a single image file that also contains the metadata. This is called embedded metadata, because the information telling you about the artwork is coded directly into the JPEG file. This is especially useful if you download a lot of images from Artstor, because the embedded metadata will be searchable on your computer. So if you had downloaded the image illustrated here, you could search your hard drive for “Sforza” or “Piero” or “Uffizi” or any of the other words listed in the More Info box, and this image would appear in your results.

If you’re new to embedded metadata, all you really need to know is how to view it. It’s not terribly easy to access on a PC unless you have an imaging program like Photoshop installed on your computer. On a Mac, highlight the image file and then either choose Get Info from the File menu or type Command-I (⌘I), and a window like the one illustrated here will open.

But if you like having a separate text file containing the metadata, you can still get one in Artstor. Just click on Download Information in an image’s metadata panel. You can find more information on how to do this and much more on Artstor’s Embedded Metadata support page. (If you’re a PC user and you don’t already have Photoshop, you can even find a link there to a site where you can download a free–and legal!–copy of Photoshop CS2.)

And as always, if you need any help with embedded metadata, just contact me or another member of the VRC staff any time!

Rauschenberg Foundation Promotes Fair Use of Images

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Derek Churchill

Robert Rauschenberg, Odalisk, 1955-1958, Museum Ludwig, Cologne

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has taken the unprecedented and very promising step of relaxing its copyright restrictions and endorsing the fair use of its images. This means that for most educational or academic purposes, like teaching or publishing, reproduction of the Foundation’s images of artworks by Robert Rauschenberg is free, legal, and actually encouraged.

One of the most important postwar American artists, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) emerged in the 1950s to challenge the prevailing current of Abstract Expressionism in the US. His works revived some of the ideas Dada had introduced earlier in the 20th century, and set the stage for the Pop art of the 1960s. It seems fitting that an artist like Rauschenberg–who unabashedly appropriated and incorporated “found objects” made by someone else into his own work–should lead the way towards the free and legal use of copyrighted images.

Sinai Icon Collection at Princeton

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Derek Churchill

Byzantine, Saint Peter the Apostle (detail), 6th century, Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai (photo © The Sinai Icon Collection, Princeton University)

The Visual Resources Collection in Princeton University’s Department of Art & Archaeology has just launched an online Sinai Icon Collection. Built around the original color photography in the Princeton-Michigan Sinai Archive, these images document the unparalleled collection of Byzantine icons in Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai. They were photographed during the joint expeditions to the monastery carried out by Princeton, the University of Michigan, and the University of Alexandria between 1956 and 1965, led by renowned Byzantinists Kurt Weitzmann and George H. Forsyth. This new digital resource contains over a thousand images that users can download for use in class presentations. If you are unfamiliar with the icons at Mount Sinai, you may want to begin by browsing the online exhibition of Highlights of the Collection.

Walters Art Museum Waives Copyright

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Derek Churchill

Fra Carnevale (?), Ideal City (detail), ca. 1480-1484, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (artwork and digital image both in the public domain)

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore–one of our Department’s CTPhD Program partners–was among the first museums to make images of many of the artworks in its collection freely available to the public way back in 2012. Ever since that time, you have been able to download high-resolution images of its works either on the museum’s own website or in Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons (CC BY-SA) license.

Now, the Walters has taken the unprecedented step of waiving copyright altogether and dedicating these images to the public domain (CC0). There are no longer any restrictions whatsoever on your use of these images. You don’t even have to say that they came from the Walters (although in general, crediting the source of an image is still considered a best practice whenever possible).

Note that this new policy does not apply to images of every artwork in the Walters’s collection. All of the images released into the public domain are of artworks that are themselves also in the public domain. If an artwork is copyrighted, the Walters does not have the authority to place images of it in the public domain. This means that most art made since about 1900 is still under copyright, so those images are not made available here. However, since the Walters focuses mainly on earlier periods, this restriction excludes a relatively small number of the works in its collection.

Delaware Art Museum’s Online Collection

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Derek Churchill

Visitors to the Delaware Art Museum‘s website can now search for works in its newly launched online collection. So far, this includes more than 1,000 works of art; the museum’s entire collection is expected to be online by 2018. You can read more about this new feature in the museum’s press release.

Located in Wilmington, the Delaware Art Museum is best known for its important collections of Pre-Raphaelite art; Howard Pyle, the Brandywine School, and American illustration; and John Sloan and the Ashcan School.

Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA)

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Derek Churchill

After many years of development, the Getty Research Institute has finally begun to roll out its newest online vocabulary, the Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA). It joins the Getty’s other vocabularies–the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)–all of which have become standard reference tools for cataloguers of works of art.

The aim of CONA is even more ambitious than those of its fellow vocabularies. Whereas the scope of AAT was limited to art historical terms, TGN to place names, and ULAN to artists, CONA will eventually include (in theory, at least) an authoritative record for every work of art and architecture ever created.

As you can imagine, this is a massive undertaking that will require many more years of work. Right now there are only about 1000 records in CONA, and these draw heavily from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, with works like Van Gogh’s Irises. There are also records for some of the major landmarks of world architecture, like the Pantheon and Taj Mahal. The total number of records is still small enough that you will probably have more success exploring CONA by browsing rather than searching. But regardless of its current limitations, for the first time we are getting a glimpse of what will soon become one of the most important metadata resources.

New Image Sources: Rijksmuseum, Statens Museum for Kunst

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Derek Churchill

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just released Rijksstudio, its new online collection of 125,000 images. You have to register (for free) in order to do much with the site, but it does then allow you to download excellent images of works from the Rijksmuseum’s peerless collection of Dutch art. The site’s Terms and Conditions do permit personal use of its images (e.g., in a Powerpoint presentation) without requiring a fee or special permission, but for commercial or professional use (including publications), you still have to apply to the Rijksmuseum by filling out an online form.

Christen Købke, A View from Dosseringen near Sortedam Lake Looking Towards Nørrebro (detail), 1838, Statens Museum for Kunst/National Gallery of Denmark, www.smk.dk

Not quite so new, but more generous in their terms of use, are the 158 collection highlights released earlier this year as part of a pilot project by the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) in Copenhagen. These images are made available for download and unrestricted use under a Creative Commons license. That means all you have to do is credit the Museum and its website as your image source, and you are free to use these images for any purpose, commercial or not.

You can read more about Rijksstudio here and about the Statens Museum for Kunst’s pilot project here.

The Rembrandt Database

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Rembrandt, “Tronie” of a Man with a Feathered Beret, mid- to late 1630s, Mauritshuis, The Hague (http://www.rembrandtdatabase.org)

A new website on Rembrandt has just been released by the RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History) in The Hague. Although this beta version includes only a few of his paintings so far, it looks like it will become an important online resource for scholars and students of the Dutch master.

Here’s the announcement:

As of today, The Rembrandt Database is online at www.rembrandtdatabase.org.

The Rembrandt Database is a freely accessible English-language website containing research material – texts, images and other research data – on paintings by Rembrandt or attributed to him, either now or in the past, from multiple institutions The Rembrandt Database aims to become the first port of call for those researching Rembrandt’s paintings. The Rembrandt Database focuses in particular on making available the body of visual and textual material that has arisen from the technical analysis and treatment of the paintings.

After a long period of behind-the-scenes work on cataloguing, digitizing and describing documentation, entering art-historical data and developing the database and the user interface, the website can now be seen by everyone for the first time. It is still in the beta stage, but will continue to be developed and will be expanded to include new functions. Much more content is already in preparation!

We want to thank The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its generous support, all of our partners for their collaboration and all participants in the user tests for their feedback! We look forward to continuing our collaboration with (more) partners and to improve and expand this website in the next months and years.

We hope that this will be a useful tool for research on Rembrandt and that you will enjoy working with it. We appreciate your feedback.

Walters Art Museum in Wikimedia

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Édouard Manet, At the Café, ca. 1879, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Édouard Manet, At the Café, ca. 1879 (photo: Walters Art Museum)

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has made more than 19,000 images of works in its collection, along with all of their associated information, freely available to the public through Wikimedia Commons.

Wikimedia Commons, part of the Wikimedia Foundation (which also oversees Wikipedia), is an online repository of free-access images and other media files. All such images donated to Wikimedia by an institution like the Walters are considered to be in the public domain, and are intended for free and unrestricted use for any purpose.

Since last year, the Walters’ newly redesigned website has also allowed visitors to download high-resolution images of its works.

VRC@UD

The blog of the Visual Resources Center at the University of Delaware

Category Archives: Metadata Authorities