Another step in the (copy)right direction…
Following the initiatives of the British Museum, Yale University, the Walters Art Museum, and other institutions honoured in these pages, the director of the Getty, James Cuno, wrote the following on the Getty’s online magazine (http://blogs.getty.edu/iris) 12 August 2013 (excerpted):"Today the Getty becomes an even more engaged digital citizen, one that shares its collections, research, and knowledge more openly than ever before. We’ve launched the Open Content Program to share, freely and without restriction, as many of the Getty’s digital resources as possible.
The initial focus of the Open Content Program is to make available all images of public domain artworks in the Getty’s collections. Today we’ve taken a first step toward this goal by making roughly 4,600 high-resolution images of the Museum’s collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose.
These are high-resolution, reproduction-quality images with embedded metadata, some over 100 megabytes in size.
Why open content? Why now? The Getty was founded on the conviction that understanding art makes the world a better place, and sharing our digital resources is the natural extension of that belief. This move is also an educational imperative. Artists, students, teachers, writers, and countless others rely on artwork images to learn, tell stories, exchange ideas, and feed their own creativity. In its discussion of open content, the most recent Horizon Report, Museum Edition stated that ‘it is now the mark – and social responsibility – of world-class institutions to develop and share free cultural and educational resources.’ I agree wholeheartedly."
And so, as our readers will know, does The British Art Journal…
