Elena@GLAMhack21: From Open Data to the “Open Museum”?
Most recently, the COVID 19 crisis intensified the focus of cultural institutions on digital offerings. The Belvedere relies, among other things, on its extensive online collection, which is characterised not only by the intensive tagging of the images according to various art-historical rule systems, but also by the quality and quantity of the data. But how can the data be fragmented, transformed and ordered in the most meaningful way? And how can users be guaranteed barrier-free, inclusive, participatory and playful access to the collection data?
We would like to explore these questions about data, cultural heritage and digital transformation with our two mentors during this year’s cultural hackathon. Elena will devote herself to the content-related questions. As a staff member of the online collection and the image archive, she is in charge of editing and publishing all data sets from medieval to contemporary art. Martin, our database specialist, will be available to the participants as a contact person for all kinds of technical questions – whether they concern the database, the interface to the front end (e-museum) or programming as such.
In the course of the open content policy, image data on more than 5,000 objects of the Belvedere collection were made accessible free of rights, including masterpieces by Gustav Klimt (Gustav Klimt, Sonja Knips, 1897/1898, oil on canvas, 145 × 146 cm, Belvedere, Vienna © Belvedere, Vienna, Photo: Johannes Stoll).
As a “hack cornerstone”, the Belvedere makes its rich and diverse open content data available. Via an interface, the participants of the hackathon get access to metadata on more than 5,000 artworks from the collection. In addition to the image files, they can then also work with titles, authorship, dating, materials and techniques as well as dimensions and even the aforementioned keywording.
Back in autumn 2018, the Belvedere became the first art museum in Austria to commit to an open content policy, making public domain works from the collection available for download free of charge in print quality in order to increase the international visibility and usability of the collection. The implementation of this policy was initiated by the Belvedere Research Center. It is dedicated to documenting, indexing and researching Austrian art in an international context – from the Middle Ages to the present. The central concern remains the facilitation of free, open and networked access to digitised cultural heritage, which will also be processed in the course of the hackathon.
Elena Krizmanics, staff member of the Belvedere Research Center, will participate in the cultural hackathon 2021 as a mentor for content-related questions.
