NY museum eases access to images of its artworks
NEW YORK — All images of publicdomain artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection — about 375,000 — are free for anyone to use.
The museum recently announced that it had changed its openaccess policy to allow free, unrestricted use of any images of artworks in the public domain, using the license designation Creative Commons Zero, known as CC0.
For example, El Greco’s “The Vision of Saint John” ( 1609- 14) is free to download in high resolution from the Met website, no permission required.
“This has been a priority for over a decade,” said Thomas P. Campbell, director of the museum. “Twenty years ago, as a scholar, we had to negotiate access even for catalog cards.”
The 375,000 images available represent “the main body of our collections,” he said.
An additional 65,000 artworks have been digitized but are not in the public domain.
( The Met collection totals about 1.5 million works, but Campbell said the remaining art that will be digitized includes prints, engravings and ephemera.)
The Met is not the first museum to do this — the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam have done the same — but the scale and breadth of its offerings is rare for a privately held collection.
( The National Gallery website states that 45,000 open-access artworks are available; the Rijksmuseum has an ever- growing list of 150,000- plus images.)
Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York made thousands of exhibition images from its archive available online.
To broaden access as much as possible, said Loic Tallon, the Met’s chief digital officer, the Met has also joined with several partners — including Creative Commons, Wikimedia and Pinterest — to spread the museum’s reach online.