Here is a list of open art-historical data sources that can be used at Coding Dürer.
| Source | Comment | Format | Licence | URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Europeana Collections | Europeana brings together the content of around 3.500 cultural heritage institutions from across Europe – at our latest count we had over 54.2m items available on our platform. We have APIs available on Europeana Labs along with advice and documentation to support users.
See detailed data description in the blog post. |
Europeana Data Model (EDM) | Various | http://labs.europeana.eu http://www.europeana.eu/ portal/en |
| Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg | More than 8400 collection objects with links to freely usable digital images of the objects (JPEGs). The metadata contain the technical information about the works (material, technique, dimensions, signature) and their production (artist/producer, date, place of production). Additionally: Information on the subject group or the picture content and the persons. All persons and entities are also linked to the common standard file (GND). The vocabularies used to tag the objects are also mapped to the GND, Wikipedia and Geonames, to other vocabularies such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) or Iconclass. The focus of the objects is on photography. They document not only the stylistic, but also the technical development of the medium. Beginning with 19th-century daguerreotypes on the 20th-century fine printing processes and the early color photography of the 1930s. It has been used at Coding da Vinci Nord in 2016.
For details see blog post. |
LIDO-XML , JPEG |  Images: CC0 and CCBY Metadata: CC0 |
GitHub |
| Mapping Titian | It lists each painting with the unique identifier of a painting number and the fixed information about that painting by Titian as well as the changes of ownership and location (indicated by place name and longitude/latitude).
For details see blog post. |
XLS | CC0 1.0 Universal |
Mapping Titian Spreadsheet |
| DAC Open Access Images from the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University | The Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University holds more than 25,000 works on paper, chiefly prints and photographs. DAC Collection Search offers text-based records for nearly the entire collection, along with (to date) 4,590 downloadable DAC Open Access Images representing most of the DAC’s European prints from the 16th through 19th centuries. More than 70 of these images represent prints by Dürer. Each DAC Open Access Image is provided in two versions: a publication-quality TIFF (4,096 pixels long dimension) and a presentation-ready JPEG (1,024 pixels). Object metadata may be freely downloaded as structured LIDO XML and as a basic text caption.
For details see blog post. |
LIDO-XML | Metadata: CC0 1.0 Universal Images of objects in the public domain: no known copyright restrictions (see DAC Open Access Images policy) |
DAC Collection Search DAC records with Dürer images DAC Open Access Images policy |
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art | The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in three iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also take part in The Met experience online. The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides select datasets of information on more than 420,000 artworks in its Collection for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use. To the extent possible under law, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this dataset using Creative Commons Zero. This work is published from: The United States Of America. These select datasets are now available for use in any media without permission or fee; they also include identifying data for artworks under copyright. The datasets support the search, use, and interaction with the Museum’s collection. At this time, the datasets are available in CSV format, encoded in UTF-8. | CSV in UTF-8 | CC0 1.0 Universal |
GitHub |
| The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York Exhibitions |
Since MoMA opened in 1929, the Museum has presented more than 2,500 exhibitions of artworks from all moments of art history and all corners of the globe. The exhibition index data set was compiled by a project team from the MoMA Archives as part of their work to preserve, describe, and open to the public over 22,000 folders of exhibition records dating from 1929 to 1989 from its registrar and curatorial departments. The exhibitions data set lists 1,788 exhibitions, representing all of the known exhibitions held at the museum from 1929 through 1989, and 11,550 constituents, including all known curators and organizers, artists and other participants for each exhibition. The staff history dataset contains a list of all directors of the Museum and department heads of individual curatorial departments since its founding in 1929. | CSV in UTF-8 | CC0 |
GitHub |
| The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York Collection |
MoMA’s evolving collection contains almost 200,000 works from around the world spanning the last 150 years. The Artworks data set contains 130,262 records, representing all of the works that have been accessioned into MoMA’s collection and cataloged in our database. The Artists data set contains 15,091 records, representing all the artists who have work in MoMA’s collection and have been cataloged in our database. Both datasets are available in CSV format, encoded in UTF-8, and in JSON. | CSV in UTF-8 and JSON | CC0 |
GitHub |
| Albertina | The Albertina safeguards one of the most important and extensive graphic art collections in the world. It comprises around 50,000 drawings and watercolours, as well as some 900,000 graphic art works, ranging from the Late Gothic era to the present.
See detailed data description in the blog post. |
Europeana Data Model (EDM) | CC0 |
Via Europeana http://www.albertina.at/ |
| Getty Vocabularies | The Getty Vocabularies, maintained by the J. Paul Getty Trust, are structured, multilingual vocabularies that contain over 3 million terms for concepts and names with other metadata related to art, architecture, and decorative arts.
The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) ® The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) ® The Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) ® |
JSON, RDF, N3/Turtle, N-triples, Relational Tables (UTF-8), XML (UTF-8) | Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 1.0 |
Download center SPARQL endpoint |
| Getty Provenance Index® | The Getty Research Institute maintains the Getty Provenance Index®, a collection of distinct databases that contain over 1.5 million records taken from historical source materials, such as archival inventories, auction catalogs, and dealer stock books. The quantity and scope of research material that is available in each database varies by region, period, and type of document. Select datasets from the Getty Provenance Index will be published on GitHub for open and convenient access to researchers. The dataset for the Knoedler Stock Books (released November 2016) is a .csv file which provides more granular access to the data than the format that can currently be downloaded from the Provenance Index database. The Knoedler dataset contains over 40,300 records transcribed from the 11 painting stock books and enhanced with information from the 21 paintings and watercolors sales books of M. Knoedler & Co. gallery in New York (1872-1970). These datasets will eventually be superseded by the forthcoming Linked Open Data release and so are not updated or maintained. |
PDF, CSV | Knoedler dataset on GitHub has CC-0 license |
http://www.getty.edu/ research/tools/ provenance/search.html |
| Getty Open Content Program | Over 100,000 digital images are available from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute collections to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain, free of charge and without permission required. Images include paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities, sculpture, decorative arts, artists’ sketchbooks, watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, and 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks. | JPEG | Images of objects in the public domain or Getty-owned rights with no known copyright restrictions (see the Getty Open Content program policy) | http://search.getty.edu/ gateway/search?q=&cat= highlight&f=%22Open+ Content+Images%22&rows= 10&srt=a&dir=s&pg=1 |
|
RKDartists + web service |
This is a derivative set of biographical data from the extensive dataset RKDartists&. Containing biographical data of some 250,000 Dutch and foreign artists from the Middle Ages to the present. |
EAC-CPF |
ODbL-BY |
|
|
RKDimages + web service |
Through this web service descriptive data is offered for around 240,000 works of art made in the Dutch cultural domain from the Middle Ages to the present day. |
OAI-PMH |
ODbL-BY |
|
|
iconclass browser + API |
Iconclass is a classification system designed for art and iconography. It is the most widely accepted scientific tool for the description and retrieval of subjects represented in images (works of art, book illustrations, reproductions, photographs, etc.) and is used by museums and art institutions around the world. |
SKOS/RDF or JSON |
ODbL-BY |
http://www.iconclass.org/ |
| Nationalmuseum, Sweden | This dataset contains data and images of around 3000 paintings held in the Nationalmuseum’s collections. The data contains information on the artist, title, media- and dimension information and often information on the depicted persons of the artwork. Each dataset includes a link to an iiif-resource, so that the image material can be used as flexible as possible. | LIDO XML, TIFF (on Wikimedia Commons), IIIF | CC BY SA or marked Public Domain | GitHub or Wikidata |
| prometheus – das verteilte digitale Bildarchiv für Forschung und Lehre | prometheus is a distributed digital image archive that currently connects 90 databases from universities, other research institutions and museums. Over 1,500,000 high-quality digitized images from the fields of arts, culture and history are available for researchers and students. Due to copyrights authentication is required except for 19 Open-Access-Databases which are freely accessible. It’s also possible to retrieve metadata via the prometheus-API: Using the API you will be able to perform searches, retrieve metadata of images or query collections. | XML, JSON (prometheus Data Model) | Various (see respective database) | API Machine readable description (WADL) |
| Yale Center for British Art |
The YCBA has been sharing high-resolution images of its collection objects in the public domain since Yale University adopted its Open Access Policy in 2011 , and today about 71,000 such images are available for download free of charge, including for commercial usage.
For more details see the blog post. |
LIDO XML, CIDOC CRM RDF, IIIF | CC0 for images and data | GitHub |
Additional data sources:
- Rijksmuseum’s collection
- Images d’Art: Artworks from French Museums
- Walters Art Museum
- British Museum collection
- Metadata of Tate’s collection at Github
- and other sources from cultural institutions
- and APIs by Museums
If you have other sources of art-historical open data that you think would fit into our objective, please send us an email with a link and description.
We invite everyone with open art-historical data (GLAM institutions, academics and others) to join us and take the chance to present their data sources to the interdisciplinary group of 40 people at Coding Dürer and see what they might accomplish within those five days in March and possibly beyond. Please send us the name of your institution or collection, a short comment, the data format, its licence and URL according to the examples below and we are happy to add them to the list.
If you would like to present your data in content and structure more comprehensively and more interactively, it is also possible that
- you personally present your data on March 13 in Munich,
- we set up a Skype session where you are able to present your data on March 13,
- you send us a short video (2 minutes max.) that will be shown on March 13, or
- you write a blog entry on our website about your data.