Keynote presentation in Belgrade on December 15th, 2016 about museums and the challenges of open access and how the Rijksmuseum dealt with this during the last decade.

1. Belgrade – 15/12/2016 – Conference
Museums and the Challenges of Open Access
From Open Access
to Open Collections
to Open Minds
Saskia Scheltjens
Head of Research Services

2. Previous & Current Workplace
Rijksmuseum / NetherlandsGhent University / Belgium

3. From Open Access
to Open Collections
Stilleven met vergulde bokaal, Willem Claesz. Heda, 163 - http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.collect.8634

5. Facts and Figures
Rijksmuseum building
By architect Pierre Cuypers
44,500 msq floor space
14,500 msq exhibition space
1885 2,8 mio guilders
2003-2013 375 mio euros
Between 2003-2013 (10 years!)
closed due to extensive renovations
almost no exhibition space available

6. Facts and Figures
Rijksmuseum collection
National Museum of Art ánd History
Largest art historical collection online
Physical Collection
Collection of ~1,200,000 objects
Print collection ~700.000 prints
Artworks on display ~8.000 (in flux)
Famous for its collection of Dutch
Masters of the Golden Age
(Rembrandt, Vermeer, …)

7. REFOCUS ON COLLECTION
• By 2008, start of a new Collection Management department
• Focus on complete collection registration (minimal level)
-> ambition is to have complete collection online by 2020
• Start of first large digitisation projects (Print Room Online, …)
• Discussions about the need for a Digital Asset Management system
• First iterations of the Rijksmuseum website & collection data online

8. AND BY THEN
THE INTERNET
HAPPENED
EXPLODED

10. Regaining control
by sharing

13. 2003-2010
• Discussions curators & administration about opening up
the object collections via the website
• Reorganisation of collection departments
• Co-operations with universities re digital heritage data
Beginning of 2011
• Choice for CC-BY licence for object images
• Limited selection of the collection online for free
• Discussion with Europeana on how to deal with licences
• Diversification: different uses, different sizes

14. CC BY SA Attribution-ShareAlike)
https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0
CC BY (Attribution only)
https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0
CC0 waiver
https://creativecommons.org/
publicdomain/zero/1.0
Overview: http://opendefinition.org/licenses
Most frequently used OA licenses

15. End of 2011
• Participation several hackathons (Open Cultuurdata, …)
• First (de facto) Open Data Policy Rijksmuseum
• Images available on a very high resolution (300 dpi)
• Europeana White Paper about Open Access
businessmodels (Verwayen 2011)

18. Knowledge needs to be shared
Taco Dibbits
Director Rijksmuseum
Core of current de facto Open Data Policy

19. 2012
• New mission
‘The museum links individuals with art and history’
• New digital strategy
• New website of the Rijksmuseum
• Core: Rijksstudio
• Tactile and visual
• Target audience ‘culture snacker’
• Mobile
• Stimulation of remixing via ‘Rijksstudio Award’

26. Beginning of 2013
• Reopening of the physical museum
End of 2013
• Creative Commons 0 licence for the whole collection
• Reduction of revenu for digital images sales
• Increase of income due to reopening and funding
• Focus on larger digitisation funds instead of image sale
• API (application programming interface) for the whole website
• Persistent identifiers (PID) for all objects in the collection
• ‘Democratising the Rijksmuseum’ – Europeana report (Pekel 2013)

29. 2014
• Research projects about semantic crowdsourced tagging
• Public high profile annotation events for niches
• Wikipedia edith-a-thons
2016
• Co-operation with Google Art Institute with VR
• Tests with Linked Data & Tripple Store for collection data

32. BUT

35. RIJKSMUSEUM RESEARCH LIBRARY
National Art Library of the Netherlands
~450.000 volumes of art books, auction catalogues, periodicals
Non-stop acquisition since 1885
Opened up long before the object collection did
Metadata accessible via open API’s since 2008 -
Uses an Open Database License (ODbL) and CC0 since 2008 -
Runs open source Koha library software since 2011 -
Founding member OCLC Art Discovery Group Catalogue 2014 -

37. RIJKSMUSEUM ART DOCUMENTATION
~1 km of documentary data (vertical files) about art objects
Not yet digitized but very important for curators
Completely unknown & underused
Complicated re copyright
Increasingly hybrid (digital & print)

38. RIJKSMUSEUM RESEARCH DATA
Heterogeneous (digital) research data
From researchers & curators, technical art researchers,
conservationists, restauration departments …..
Upgrade to a formal data policy planned in 2017
Plans for the building of a digital institional repository

39. A shift in research output and methodologies

40. Panpoeticon Batavûm, hypothetical 3D reconstruction of a wooden cabinet
by Lieke Van Deinsen (Rijksmuseum Fellow) & Timothy De Paepe

41. Increasingly, focus on data driven research

42. Paint Sample Database (not yet released)

43. Paint Sample Database (not yet released)

44. Paint Sample Database (not yet released)

45. Former (sub)departments involved in reorganisation
‘Research Services’
department
• Rijksmuseum Research Library
• Collection Documentation
• Application IT & Collection
Data Management
• Study Room / Print Room
• Stacks

46. REORGANISATION
Take off Research Services (June 1st, 2016)
• Centralisaton of different departments & new mission
• 30 FTE (information specialists, IT, …)
• Focus on interdisciplinary data - & information
management
• Support research & develop innovative new services

47. FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
Consolidating integrated semantic collection data infrastructure
Data Modelling EDM & CIDOC-CRM
Semantic open collection data (LOD)
Extending & Communicating Open Collection Data Strategy
Focus on research data & institutional repository infrastructure

48. •
Openingsspeech by Taco Dibbits, director Rijksmuseum (2016)

49. From Open Access
to Open Collections
to Open Minds
Stilleven met vergulde bokaal, Willem Claesz. Heda, 163 - http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.collect.8634

50. Contact information
Let’s talk!
Saskia Scheltjens
s.scheltjens@rijksmuseum.nl
http://www.slideshare.net/saschel/presentations
@saschel
This presentation only uses images with an open licence