Case Study: Rijksmuseum releases 111.000 high quality images to the public domain. | OpenGLAM

"In 2011, the Rijksmuseum has started to look into the possibilities of releasing some of their images on the web. At that point the Dutch Open Cultuur Data initiative contacted the museum and asked if they could make some images available for the Apps4Amsterdam competition. At that point, it was decided that also the high quality scans of their most famous works should be made accessible in order to promote the collection of the museum to a wider audience. They continued working on clearing the rights and to get the descriptive information right. This has now resulted in 111.000 digital images of artworks that are in the public domain that they can offer without any copyright restrictions. The images are made available as a download, but also via an API. At the end of 2012, this was accompanied with the launch of the Rijksstudio where people can more easily get access to the material and create their own exhibition. It is encouraged to take and reuse the images in any way possible and to share the results with the Rijksmuseum. At the same time the museum sells images via their image bank. While the high quality images of about 2 mb are freely available, the museum charges a small fee for the huge tiff files of about 150 mb. The museum has indicated that so far they have not seen a drop in the amount of images they sell to commercial companies and they now occasionally sell images to regular users as well. Also at the tourist shop no decline in sales has been noticed so far."