Hi everyone,
Most of you may have already heard about it, Paris Musées, which regroups 14 heritage sites, has just officially announced this month the opening of more than 100,000 digitized works on its collections platform, under CC-0 licence.
This is indeed a significant event for french cultural institutions and open glam because it is the first Parisian institution, which moreover hosts many masterpieces, to act such a policy of opening and dissemination of heritage. The images are offered in High Definition with access via a dedicated API. This is a real long-term approach, matured over the last 3 years (obviously inspired by international examples including Met art and Rijksmuseum), because 100,000... Is only a beginning.
In this project, Wikimedia France has worked and met Paris Musées project managers during its Glam national meeting in may 2019. We are now supporting Paris musées, within the framework of a formal partnership, in the import of images and data to Wikimedia commons and Wikidata and in training courses on those Wikimedia projects for some of their cultural agents.
Many of these images and masterpieces, as La Tourgue in 1835 or Woman with blue eyes, will be obviously used to illustrate Wikipedia articles. One or more edit-a-thons could be organised this year. But meanwhile, the first steps are planned for the first quarter of 2020.
You will find more information, in french for the moment and i would need some translation help, on the dedicated article available here: https://www.wikimedia.fr/2020/01/16/paris-musees-le-choix-determinant-de-lopen-content/.
We obviously hope that this case will help disseminate open content in cultural environments as Musée St Raymond of Toulouse or Archives nationales de France have used to do for several years.
Available for more informations and happy to share that great news with you,
Best,
Xavier
