Digitised Art in the Open
Web umenia | An Open Project Spotlight
Philo van Kemenade (@phivk) creates technology that drives curiosity. He works at lab.SNG where he helps the Slovak National Gallery research & develop digital tools to connect people to art. Philo was selected to join our current round of Mozilla Open Leaders with his project Web umenia.
I interviewed Philo to learn more about Web umenia and how you can help.
What is Web umenia?
Web umenia is a platform to explore digitised art collections from public galleries and museums. It allows anyone curious about art to search and explore the artworks from multiple institutions in a connected and user-friendly way. Web umenia also encourages creative reuse through an API and by making high res digital reproductions of public domain artworks available for both personal and commercial use.
Why did Web umenia start?
Web umenia was started by the Slovak National Gallery to open up the collections of Slovak art museums. These collections are conveniently indexed in a central registry, which gave us a unique opportunity to build a web platform around that.
How does Web umenia help the broader open movement in the Gallery, Library, Art & Museum (GLAM) sector?
GLAM organisations have been digitising their collections for a while now. An online collection platform is an important step to unleash the value of this work. Web umenia is a great example of how this can be done in a thoughtfully designed and open way.
More concretely, organisations with internal development resources are encouraged to build on our open-source work. We also offer institutions support to publish their artworks from a Collection Management System and to customize Web umenia to their needs.
What are you most proud of accomplishing at MozFest?
We met so many like-minded folks at MozFest and felt we needed some space dedicated to the theme of working open in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. A few conversations later we had an #OpenGlam lunch-time chat on the programme and sat down with a fantastic group to share anecdotes and inspiration from all over the world. I was very happy we managed to pull this conversation together as it’s super import to share stories about what works and what doesn’t!
How has your project been impacted by Mozilla Open Leaders?
The programme has helped tremendously to express ourselves better about our open aspirations and how people can contribute to the project. It has facilitated great conversations both internally as well as with external people. This in turn has resulted in clear ideas that we are now working on together with contributors via GitHub!
How can others help you continue the work on Web umenia?
The most valuable contributions have thus far come from extending functionality to meet the requirements of other galleries. We’d love to see Web umenia taken up by others in this field and make it fit their use case. Our GitHub repo is a great place to learn more and get in touch!
As we are finalizing a big internationalisation project, we would also love to have more English articles and collections on the platform. People who are interested writing about art on Web umenia should get in touch! Email us at lab@sng.sk or comment on this issue.
But I believe the best way to have impact with open access is for people to use the artworks to do their own creative thing! We recently ran a remix competition that generated amazing creations we could have never imagined. We also partner with different publications to embed art along with their articles. So I’d say, download a high res public domain image or use our API and surprise us!
What meme or gif best represents your project?
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