Way Cool!

From a business model perspective,  museums have always been in a good position to publish open data since it is all about getting donations,  getting people in the door and the various cultural tie-ups.

The blog does point out another issue which is that museum people have long been rigorous about metadata despite having metadata problems more difficult than (say) libraries since most of the things that have aren't serial objects.  They made the decision to publish uncurated records and mark them as such and that makes a lot of sense.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 5:58 PM, Quim Gil <qgil@wikimedia.org> wrote:
The Museum of Modern Art of New York has published a CSV on GitHub containing the data of its entire collection under a CC0 license.

https://github.com/MuseumofModernArt/collection


"This data release includes all of the works that have been both accessioned into MoMA’s collection and cataloged in our database. It includes basic data for each work, including title, artist, date made, medium, dimensions, and date acquired by the Museum."

"MoMA’s open data is primarily intended to be useful to scholars, so it was important to make each version citable." 

"Thanks to the Cooper-Hewitt and Tate for paving the way by releasing their own collection data on GitHub using CC0. Thanks also to George Oates (@goodformand) for reassuring us that a CSV is not just the easiest way to start but probably the most accessible format for a broad audience of researchers, artists, and designers."

They actually produced a live, on-site performance about the data released, and blogged about it: https://medium.com/@blprnt/a-sort-of-joy-1d9d5ff02ac9

"This release of open data by MoMA is by no means revolutionary. Two years ago the Tate Modern released its own collection on GitHub. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has not only released its data (images and all), it has also built an API to allow anyone easy access to it. In 2013 the British Museum released 1,000,000 images under a Creative Commons license."

Anyway, this might not be big or surprising news to those of you following closely this scene. I just found amusing to learn accidentally about this the day that Wiki Loves Open Data has started taking shape in a wiki page.

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Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

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Paul Houle

Applying Schemas for Natural Language Processing, Distributed Systems, Classification and Text Mining and Data Lakes