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About the RKD

The RKD is a renowned documentation and research institute. As a knowledge institute we work in collaboration with museums, heritage institutes, universities and private institutes. Members of our staff are involved in research, publications and organising events. We harbour unique archives, documentation and photographic material and the largest art historical library on Western art from the Late Middle Ages to present, with the focus on Dutch, Southern and Northern Netherlands, art. Our collections contain information on tens of thousands of paintings, drawings and sculptures, but also cover monumental art, modern media and design.

RKD is publishing substantial parts of its data through (beta) web services. All sets are made available under ODbL-BY  (Open Database Licence – Attribution). Note: this licence is for the metadata only. Images are not licenced, although they might be in the public domain. RKD is currently exploring the options around Open Access and Content. All suggestions are welcome.

RKDimages web service (OAI-PMH)

The RKDimages web service is made for application developers and others who want to consult the data from RKDimages in machine-readable format. Through this web service descriptive data  is offered for around 240,000 works of art from the Middle Ages to the present day. 

This data set is made available under ODbL-BY  (Open Database Licence – Attribution). The web service works on the basis of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting OAI-PMH. The format is RDF and using DC-Terms, FOAF en Schema.org: namespaces.

Please note that the license concerns the descriptive data. Images can be retrieved in low resolution with watermark, but these are not yet available as open content.

RKDartists web service/Open Search (EAC-CPF)

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. The ampersand in the name indicates that also art dealers, art collectors and art historians are included in this database. RKDartists serves also as an index to the extensive art historical documentation of the RKD. That analog documentation (images, archives, press documentation and literature) can then be viewed at the RKD. RKDartists is used by other (Dutch) heritage institutions as authorized name authority file in their own collections.

The displayed elements are made available under the Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) standard. Each object (artists record) can be accessed via a URI (Uniform Research Identifier). Also there is in the data a deep link to the full record in RKDexplore.

This data set is made available under ODbL-BY  (Open Database Licence – Attribution).

And ICONCLASS as LOD

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. So you can find the iconclass codes in many collection information systems. Although it’s considered a complex system with a high learning curve, Iconclass is second to none as a system for art (historical) subject annotation. The Iconclass system is accessible through the Iconclass  Browser and available as Linked Open Data (LOD)

Please check the list of data sources for more information on these data sources

Mapping Titian is a site that allows users to visualize one of the most fundamental concerns of the discipline of Art History: the interrelationship between an artwork and its changing historical context. Focusing on the paintings executed by the Venetian Renaissance artist, Titian (ca. 1488-1576), this site offers a searchable provenance index of his attributed pictures and allows users to create customizable collections of paintings and customizable maps that show the movement of the pictures over time and space with the application of various filters. The collections and maps can be shared with other users or can remain private. The site also includes a glossary with short biographies of patrons and collectors of Titian’s pictures and references with a selected bibliography of relevant scholarship. The main goal of Mapping Titian is to create a tool from which new research, discoveries, and experiences can be inspired, guided, and shared. The site was developed with a grant from the Kress Foundation by Jodi Cranston, Department of the History of Art & Architecture, Boston University, Boston MA. We encourage the Coding Dürer participants to register as users of the Mapping Titian site and will be happy to showcase any of the results from the event in March!

The paintings by the 16th-century Venetian artist have proven to be an especially rich microcosm of possible directions for a mapping platform currently under development, Mapping Paintings, of which this current site would be one part. Titian’s pictures involve a variety of conditions and circumstances—a celebrity artist with a publicized reputation during and after his lifetime, the international city of Venice, a reliance on travel and letters for communication and exchange—which also play a role in the “lives” of artworks in successive time periods.  

The data used to generate the Mapping Titian site can be accessed through the excel spreadsheet, which can be accessed here for the Coding Dürer event. There are two pages to the spreadsheet. The first page lists each painting with the unique identifier of a painting number and the fixed information about that painting. The second page lists each painting by its unique identifying number only and charts the changes of ownership and location (indicated by place name and longitude/latitude). Each painting number appears every time there is a change in ownership and/or location. Some paintings are listed only one time and others appear with more than 20 entries. There are additional notes and color codings on the spreadsheet which are not important for this event.  

Europeana is Europe’s digital platform for cultural heritage, providing online access to over 54 million digitised items  (from books, photos, and paintings to television broadcasts and 3D objects) from over 3500 cultural institutions across Europe in 31 languages. 20.8m records allow free reuse. In Europeana Art, our dedicated thematic collection for art and art history,  you can browse 1.4m objects, search by topic, artist, or colour, and explore specially curated exhibitions.

You can access Europeana’s content either by manual download or via the Europeana APIs. We currently have four free-to-use APIs (accessible by a simple registration process) and we encourage you to register for your preferred API keys before the Coding Dürer event. The REST API is our key resource and most used API. It enables users to filter records by a wide variety of metadata fields  – from the metadata submitted by our data providers (e.g. date, creator) to the technical metadata we extract from the linked media files (e.g. image size or video duration) and the semantic enrichment from linked open vocabularies (e.g. enrichment for period, location, events, or persons). The Europeana Linked Open Data service allows you to explore, access, and download metadata through the SPARQL endpoint provided by Europeana. With the Europeana OAI-PMH service, users can harvest the entirety or a selection of, Europeana metadata. Finally, the Europeana Annotations API allows users to generate, update, and retrieve short descriptions for objects in our collections. Users can access comprehensive and regularly updated documentation on Europeana Labs and find answers to your questions on the Europeana API forum.

On Europeana Labs you can also find nearly 90 thematic datasets containing high quality, openly licensed, and directly accessible items on topics ranging from art, design, and architecture to World War I. We also showcase reuse tools and examples of games, apps, and other creations that use the Europeana API and content. We hope to add interesting and innovative outputs from Coding Dürer to this list!

Contact Nicole McNeilly if you have any questions or talk to Douglas McCarthy, Europeana Art & Photography Collections Manager, at Coding Dürer in March.