The Met Celebrates Third Anniversary of Open Access Program
Milestone will be marked by a panel discussion with thought-leaders
from the world of technology, art, and AI.
(New York, February 19, 2020)—This month, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is celebrating the third anniversary of its Open Access Program, which seeks to make the Museum's collection one of the most accessible, discoverable, and useable on the internet. Since its launch in 2017 with 375,000 images, the Museum has added 70,000 images to its catalog of open content, allowing users around the world to digitally connect with the art and narratives of 5,000 years of history throughout the collection.
"The Met's Open Access Program has been a trailblazing effort and a fundamental step to reach new audiences, spark connections to our collection, and create greater access to art, and the waves of innovation and creativity these images have generated is astounding and inspiring," said Max Hollein, Director of The Met. "Our engagement with a wide range of partners provides unexpected insights and builds pathways throughout the larger network of art, culture, and technology, and has helped shape the way we make the collection more accessible to creators, researchers and makers around the world."
Since the launch of The Met Collection API in 2019, the Museum has been engaging with new partners and programs, like Parsons School of Design data visualization classes; a University of Virginia School of Data Science graduate team developing a machine learning model; Wikimedia Foundation's effort to provide structured data in WikiData; and Visipedia, an academic project investigating machine learning techniques and systems. All of these new programs are able to access data and images that the Museum makes available in CSV format or with an API.
There are currently over 450,000 images of over 230,000 distinct art objects, all under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license from The Met Open Access Program, available for use without restriction. Through Open Access, API data is updated daily, and filters including artist, date, geography, culture and more have been added to make the collection more useable. The Met is discovering a number of ways the collection can be used for pioneering research and exploration, and ways that our database can be used as a model for new programs and applications. To date, the Museum has received over 42 million requests to the API, with over 29,000 unique users.
To mark the third anniversary of The Met's Open Access Program, there will be a special panel discussion that will explore how Open Access, when combined with technology, can reach new audiences, make meaningful connections, and provide pathways for technologists, researchers and creators to expand the possibilities for the future. "Advancing Connections to Art with Open Access and AI" will take place at the Museum on Thursday, February 20, 2020 and will include presentations and a discussion with panelists Matthew Ritchie, a New York-based contemporary artist whose work explores the visual expression of systems; Serge Belongie, Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and Associate Dean at Cornell Tech; Stefano Corazza, Founder and Former CEO of Mixamo.com, now VP & Fellow at Adobe; and Eva Kozanecka, content strategist and program co-lead of Artists + Machine Intelligence at Google AI. Attendance is by invitation. Media R.S.V.Ps are required, space is limited.
There will also be a series of Met blog posts that explore a variety of themes related to The Met's Open Access Program.
Documentation and resources on how to use The Met Collection API, as well as additional information about Open Access, are available at metmuseum.org/openaccess.
About The Met
The Met presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world in three New York City locations—The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters. Since it was founded in 1870, the Museum has made art come alive in its galleries and through exhibitions and events, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and cultures.
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