2+3D Photography 2017 – Notes Henrike Hövelmann

1. I’m very pleased to welcome you to our presentation about how to digitize the
entire museum collection of the Rijksmuseum.
My name is Henrike Hövelmann and together with my colleague Froukje van
der Meulen. I will present to you today about this enormous digitization effort
the Rijksmuseum is going to take the coming years.
I’m projectmanager of one of our digitizationprojects and I have been working
at the Rijksmuseum since 2008.
I’d like to start with a short story:
This is Erik, Erik is cataloguer in the Rijksmuseum, last month he worked in the
depot while preparing shelves with seals voor digitization. On one of the
shelves he found a box which was supposed to host 11 seals. When he opened
the box it hosted a lot of other groups of seals as well and he found in total 531
objects.
Maybe some of you know this wow –feeling that is almost immediately
followed by a buzzer:
what now - how do I manage this extra 520 seals on top of my planned work.
This story gives you an idea of what happens day to day when you are busy
with an overall maintenance of your collection, which used to be approximately
1 million items.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today’s presentation will focus on three asbects:
1. At first I will start with giving you a short outline of our collection, the
digitization efforts so far and how we’ll got the chance of initiating this
project.
2. Secondly I want to give you an idee of how we organise this project, who
is involved?
3. Finally my colleague Froukje who is projectcoordinator of the Image
department will provide you with lots of examples and experiences from
our collection storage in Lelystad.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1

2. The Rijksmuseum is most famous for it’s 17 th century Dutch paintings but the
collection of the museum is so much more.
The Rijksmuseum is the Dutch museum of art and history. This explains why
our collection hosts a wide range of different types of art works, historical
artefacts and documents.
Fron our whole collection only 1 % is on permanent view in our
museumgalleries.
The collection consists of the more traditional categories paintings, pieces of
sculpture and furniture as well as glassware, ceramics, textiles and musical
instruments as we heard yesterday.
But the vast majority of our objects are works on paper, aproximately 700.000.
If you take a look at the timeline than we are rather a museum of the 19th
century than a museum of the 17th
century.
Just to give you an idea of the size of objects :
The Smallest object in our collection has the size of my thumbnail and is a
NG-VG-12-10 - Miniature coffin made from the remains of the original coffin of
the leading Dutch patriot Johann Derk van der Capellen. Who died in 1784
during the heydays of the Patriot movement. 2 x 1 x 0,9 cm.
Biggest object:
SK-A-1115 Painting of the Battle of Waterloo by the Dutch painter Jan Willem
Pieneman from 1824. 823 x 567 cm Which is 8x5 and a half
The painting measures 45 square meters.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2

3. As you probably know we did not start this project of bringing the whole
museum collection online from scratch. During the last decades the
Rijksmuseum has already focused on several digitizationprojects of the
museum collection. To name just a few:
• The majority of the paintings were digitized from 2006 onwards
• In 2008 we digitized parts of the accesory collection for our first online
exhibition Accesorize!
• For the reopening of the museum in 2013 we digitized all the 8.000
objects that are on permanent view at the museum.
• When our website Rijksstudio was launched in the same year we had
already 125.000 objects online to share with the public and for free
reuse available. Our director Erik van Ginkel referred to this
museumpolicy yesterday in his welcome words.
But still in the furthcoming 5 years we will have to digitize approximately
500.000 objects. Quite a challenge.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What was our trigger to dream this dream of a wholly digitized collection?
In 2019 we will move with our collection storage to a yet to be build
sustainable collection Centre called “Collection Centre Netherlands” CCNL.
We’ll share this centre with 3 partner institutions that host similar objects. If
you share space it’s important to know what is yours and what not. The 4
partners made appointments about registration and digitization of the
collection and in the future all the metadata and images of the stored objects
will be organized in one warehousemanagement system.
Therefore we had to initiate a new project which includes marking or checking
the inventory numbers, condition checks, registration, attaching barcode tags
and finally digitization of all the 3d objects and paintings. This project is called
Voila.
We combine this new project with a project we already worked on for 10 years
that includes cataloguing and digitization of all the works on paper of our
collection. This second project is called Print room online.
3

4. These two projects made the dream of a wholly digitized collection suddenly
possible.
The work on our collection is organized around our different storages. The
works on paper are stored in Amsterdam at the museum, and the 3d objects
and paintings are stored in Lelystad approximately 45 minutes from here by
car.
We are currently working with 40 projectmembers that are purely dedicated to
this huge project of overall collection maintenance.
Erik you already know, you met him at the beginning of my presentation.
Let me now introduce you to some more colleagues:
In the upper left you see Hanna who is a cataloguer for our collection of artist
letters. She registers aproximately 40 letters a day.
Next to her you see Dennis, he is a photographer in the works on paper studio.
Dennis shoots between 100-150 images a day.
Saskia , underneath Hanna, is collection manager and you can see her here
while she is attaching barcode tags on the framework of a painting.
I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to our second presentor
Froukje who works as a projectcoordinator in our storage in Lelystad. She
organizes the digitization of the objects and coordinates the workflow of
registration, conservation and digitization.
Now I’d like to hand over the floor to her.
4