The New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is pursing a new Open Access policy that would result in the release of high-resolution imagery of all its public-domain works, which is over 375,000 in total. The new initiative has had a major impact on sites such as Wikimedia and Creative Commons, and recently the Met announced a partnership with Google’s data analytics platform, BigQuery. This interesting information came to us from Artnet in their article, “With ‘Open Access,’ the Met Museum’s Digital Operation Has a Bona Fide Hit on Its Hands.”
The Met’s website has seen a 64 percent increase in image downloads since Open Access was implemented, as well as a 17 percent bump in traffic to the online collection. Users who download photographs are now spending five times as long on the site.
Wikimedia is by far the biggest beneficiary of the photo-sharing program. Over 90 percent of the Open Access photographs have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
