Museums have multiple roles in society. At Pretwerk.nl we mainly look at the public function and are educational days out. Managing and preserving collections is the second important pillar on which museums rely. Museums often have many more objects in house than they exhibit. The Rijksmuseum is now making 800.000 works of art, 500.000 books and 800 meters of documentation digitally accessible and searchable.
The Rijksmuseum launches Collectie Online , a new platform that makes the Rijksmuseum collection even more accessible. Using Linked Open Data and AI technology, everyone can search the collection, collect, download, and share images and information in a simple and engaging way. With Collectie Online, the Rijksmuseum sets a new standard for sharing heritage data.
The Rijksmuseum collection belongs to everyone. Whether you are a scientist, an art lover or just curious, everyone has the right to the most up-to-date information. That is why we have decided to share as much knowledge and images as possible with the world. Art and history are now closer than ever.
Taco Dibbits, General Director of the Rijksmuseum:
All knowledge in one place
To link everything about the collection together, the Rijksmuseum developed a special infrastructure that connects various data systems. For this, Linked Open Data was used , a universal method for releasing structured data into the public domain. In line with the Information and Data Policy, new data sources will be continuously added to Collectie Online in the future , such as archival documents and research results from, for example, Operation Night Watch . In the long term, it will also be possible to link with sources from other museums. In this way, digital knowledge of art and history is becoming increasingly widely findable and usable worldwide.
Everyone a curator: create your own Hall of Fame
Via a search bar and hundreds of automatically generated theme pages, a treasure trove of art, history, and knowledge is opened, in which users can wander endlessly. They can curate their personal collections from 800.000 online images, compare objects, and even create their own interactive video clip. In a virtual 360-degree view of the Gallery of Honour, anyone can display a personal selection of masterpieces. The Art Explorer makes getting acquainted with the collection even more accessible. In this new AI-supported tool , visitors answer thought-provoking questions. The answers provide unexpected suggestions from the collection.
Online innovations
In the museum world, this method of making integrated data accessible via a visually appealing user interface and an AI-driven search capability has never before been applied on this scale. In 2012, the Rijksmuseum launched Rijksstudio and became the first museum in the world to make a record number of 125.000 high-resolution images available for free. In 2022, the Rijksmuseum published a photo of The Night Watch in the highest possible resolution (717 gigapixels). In 2023, all of Vermeer's paintings came online in ultra-high resolution. The Rijksmuseum received multiple international awards for these applications.
More information: www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie