Even if you've never visited New York City, you know the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You may not have wandered the Cloisters' medieval gardens, but you've seen the museum's unicorn tapestries in such movies as The Secret Garden, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Perhaps you've never visited the Temple of Dendur at Fifth Avenue, but you might have read about the Met's high-profile acquisition of Van Gogh's "Wheat Field with Cypresses."
While patrons still need to make a pilgrimage to New York to explore the museum's gardens and relics, a new announcement promises to open up the Met's collections in ways that I would not have imagined possible a few years ago: The Met will make all of its public-domain artifacts available for free and unrestricted use.
The selection of a CC0 license is significant for artists, art lovers, and entrepreneurs. "With Creative Commons Zero, there are literally no restrictions," Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons, told me. "Visitors can make their own products, start their own businesses, and create their own original artworks."
Effective immediately, patrons can download, use, and reuse 375,000 images from the Met's collection. Thanks to a public domain artworks filter on the Museum's search engine, locating open source art is effortless. Access to those unicorn tapestries and wheat fields are a keyword search away, as are gelatin silver prints from the 1939 World's Fair, Paul Klee's oil and watercolors, and high-resolution photographs of the museum's favrile glassware. The Met's staff even created thematic sets—artistic playlists—ranging from Arms and Armor to Monsters and Mythological Creatures.
The announcement is a boon to patrons near and far, and one that I suspect will entice more visitors to explore the Met's three locations. But make no mistake, the availability of open-access images is only part of the story. As I've discussed before, the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress have opened up their collections and encouraged the public to explore and repurpose materials. What's unique about the announcement is the extent to which the museum has pursued partnerships to expand access to and engagement with its collections
I reached out to staff at the Met and partner organizations Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Artstor, and the Digital Public Library of America. What I discovered was an intricate and longstanding collaboration that highlights the Met's leadership and serves as a model for institutional collaboration.
New Policy, Same Ethos
Contrary to some reporting, the Met announcement is less consummation than a continuation of the museum's shift toward open access. Last week's announcement builds on the museum's 2014 Open Access for Scholarly Content, through which staff made 400,000 high-resolution digital images available for non-commercial use. Last week's announcement revises that policy so that patrons can use those images however they wish.
"Open access is less a flashy announcement than another milestone in the evolution of the Met's practice," explained Loic Tallon, the Museum's Chief Digital Officer. "Cataloging collections and increasing access to those collections has always been central to the museum's mission. Open access is the next step in an evolution of those practices, and is important for ensuring we meet the changing needs and expectations of 21st century audiences."
Tallon gave the example of photographic practices: whereas a black-and-white photo was once satisfactory, the Met has upgraded its practices in response to changing technology and expectations. (To that point, the museum has many 4K images that staff would like to make available once they address hosting issues.)
The museum's new policy is just that, a new policy. As the Met adds new public domain images to its digital catalog, they will automatically be made available with Creative Commons licensing. That's noteworthy because the Met collection is vast: some 1.5 million items. According to Tallon, the museum added 18,000 open-access images to its catalog last year, and he expects a similar number of images will be made available in 2017.
Putting Policy Into Practice
Making that kind of policy change isn't as simple as flipping a switch. It required close collaboration between staff throughout the museum's curatorial departments. Developers had to revise metadata formats. A dedicated project manager had to work hand-in-glove with the Met's legal team. And once all parties agreed upon the policy change and identified materials that were certainly within the public domain, changes had to be applied in the museum's collections data system and digital-asset-management system.
"This announcement required a ton of work on the side of digital and curatorial staff who had to prepare images and data in order to relicense them for the website. It's thankless work, but without it, this announcement wouldn't have been possible," explained Ryan Merkely, CEO of Creative Commons.
When one considers the invisible labor involved in a policy change that won't yield new revenue, a more skeptical writer might ask, why bother? The counterpoint is that managing licensing isn't cheap.
"Any move towards open source requires institutions to balance opportunities and tradeoffs, evaluating the revenue streams attached to the exclusivity of works," according to Merkely. "That said, revenue from licensing rarely exceeds to the cost of maintaining the exclusivity of images."
Once an institution decides to embrace open access, it has to perform significant legal analysis to identify the appropriate tool for sharing their content. The Met chose Creative Commons because, according to Merkely, they wanted a format that was universally understood and accepted, and they selected CC Zero because they wanted the least restrictive licensing.
The Met's partnership with Creative Commons extends beyond licensing. Creative Commons visitors can also search the Met's collections using a beta search tool, which is in some ways preferable because it allows art lovers to search across digital collections at the Met, the New York Public Library, and the Rijksmuseum.
Wikify the Met, and Metify the Wiki
When it comes to promoting public use of open-access materials, few partners are more formidable than Wikimedia. "Many people only think about Wikipedia when in fact the Wikimedia community covers Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and more," Tallon explained. "The Met's Wikimedian in Residence will help encourage community engagement with the new images and data now released by the museum under CC0."
If you haven't heard of a Wikimedian in Residence, you're not alone; it was new to me, too. But they exist at a number of cultural institutions, including the Museo Soumaya, UNESCO, and even West Virginia University.
"They collaborate with cultural, art, or archival institutions to help digitize and share an institution's collections under open licenses, to contribute Wikipedia articles related to that institution's mission and collections, and to serve as a liaison between an institution's staff and the Wikimedia community," said Katherine Maher, executive director at the Wikimedia Foundation. "The general objective for the program is to strengthen collaborations with museums and other cultural institutions as partners in free knowledge—working together to make knowledge (in all forms—from books, archives, photographs, artworks, and so on) freely available to the world."
In the case of the Met, the Wikimedian in Residence, Richard Knipel, faces the challenge of "Wikify The Met, and Metify the Wiki." In practice, Knipel will incorporate those 375,000 open-source images into Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata (Wikimeida's data repository) in collaboration with the Wikimedia community. Knipel is off to a brisk pace: at time of writing, 165 photos have uploaded, according to the Wikimedia Commons category. However, 165 images is a rounding error in such a vast collection.
In order to place the remaining images—such that readers will see, for example, "The Dead Christ with Angels" in a Manet entry—the Met's Wikimedian will need help. "Richard will be collaborating with other Wikimedians through projects like WikiProject Metropolitan Museum of Art, to add newly available images to Wikimedia Commons, document each artwork's metadata within Wikidata, and facilitate the writing of Wikipedia articles on major artworks and art topics in the collection," explained Maher.
From Artstor to the DPLA
To educational access and use, the Met will rely upon ITHAKA-affiliated Artstor. The Met began working with Artstor long before announcement. According to Piotr Adamczyk, Artstor's director of Image Content and Museum Partnerships, the open-access collection supplements a collection that already includes thousands of historical images.
The Met's partnership with Artstor may enable higher-resolution imagery in the future. "The Met's current release comes with images that are at most 4,000 pixels on a side," said Adamczyk. "In the past, the Met has shared images that are even larger, in terms of pixel dimensions, with Artstor for educational use. You'll be able to find all of the highest-resolution public-domain images on the Met's collection page." (For an example of the museum's highest-resolution imagery, consider Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Harvesters," below).
Artstor also includes features popular with educators. Visitors can locate images using fielded metadata, add and share annotations, sort images into sets, and download those sets as presentations. The work of Artstor staff will also enable further partnerships.
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), whose partnership with the Library of Congress will receive the Met's open resources and metadata through its hub partner, Artstor. Dan Cohen, executive director at the DPLA, described the process: "DPLA will receive the Met's open resources from Artstor via the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). Artstor is currently completing their configuration of their IIIF endpoint, and as soon as it is complete, we will be receiving the content."
That the DPLA relies upon the work of an intermediary in order to share Met's open-access resources highlights the intricacy—and necessity—of institutional collaboration. When those resources are available in the DPLA later this spring, the museum's collections will join one of the most extensive digital libraries in the world. But let's be clear: reclassifying images as CC0 is just beginning of a complex, expensive, and labor-intensive process.
Public and Private Support
Merkley described the Met announcement as "an incredible act of leadership from a private museum and a signal to other institutions." I wholeheartedly agree. However, I want to close by emphasizing two aspects of the announcement that might go overlooked: the role of public and private support.
To the former point, open access is a two-way street. As Merkley put it, the announcement isn't just about art, but also the data that accompanies it. The Met has its metadata publically available through a GitHub repo, which makes "it easier for the world to search for, play with, and explore the breadth and depth of the Museum's collection," Tallon discussed in a blog post.
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However, the Museum may also benefit by opening up its data. "The Met has been in the business of running a museum, that is now also a global digital archive of 5,000 years of history," explained Merkley. "Many objects are categorized one way on the walls, and quite another way on the web. Improving that metadata will require investment from the Met and also the community who uses the materials."
To take Merkley's point a step further: Met staff face a monumental data challenge, and while they deserve credit for working in the open via GitHub, they also deserve credit for enlisting community support.
Since 1999, the foundation has provided more than $90 million for cultural institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. Certainly, this is good press for Bloomberg. However, it also signals a new paradigm for cultural institutions. In an era of diminished public support for the arts and heightened expectations of artistic institutions, staff increasingly rely upon private support. Given that reality, I would advocate that cultural institutions approach digital projects judiciously, pursuing initiatives that support outreach to a skeptical public and enable practitioners to forge new institutional alliances. The Met announcement accomplishes both ends, and I hope that other institutions choose to follow its model.