CLEVELAND — Welcome to the Cleveland Museum of Art's new “Open Access” system.
“Open Access means the public now has the ability to share, remix and reuse images of as many as 30,000 CMA artworks that are in the public domain for commercial as well as scholarly and noncommercial purposes,” officials say. “Additional information on more than 61,000 artworks – both those in the public domain and those with copyright or other restrictions – is also now available.”
Here’s how it works: The CMA’s Open Access program is the most comprehensive to date, with high-resolution images in both JPG and TIF formats as well as a fully operable application programming interface (API) that can be accessed at http://openaccess-api.clevelandart.org/. Among the significant features of the CMA’s Open Access offering are rich metadata with the inclusion of authored text, exhibition history, bibliographic citations, catalogue raisonné numbers, and provenance information for each artwork. Collection data in both the CSV and JSON file formats can be accessed via a GitHub repository at https://github.com/ClevelandMuseumArt/openaccess.
In conjunction with this new initiative, the museum is launching its newly redesigned online collection to make it easy for individuals, scholars, students and virtual visitors to have access to a wealth of information on art. This includes up to 35 fields of metadata with descriptive text, creating more possibilities for semantic relationships, contextual interpretations and translations related to artworks in the collection.
In addition, the museum’s website will allow visitors to choose the view that is best for them, whether it’s text-heavy or image-focused. The CMA has also added a refined advanced search to make finding artworks simple and intuitive. This improved feature is powered by Microsoft’s Azure search-as-a-service cloud solution and will enable users to search by specific fields, providing art historians and enthusiasts alike an opportunity to dive deeper into the collection. A newly incorporated elastic search improves the accuracy of results, including the ability to sort more easily. An auto-complete search bar proposes potential searches and suggests correct spellings for artist names.
Visit the CMA’s collection online to research, study, and download Open Access images: http://www.clevelandart.org/art/collection/search.