Open Image Archive opens up 40,000 Swedish images

Karin Nilsson, head of the department of digital resources at LSH (The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum, Sweden), tells us about the bold work they've done recently to open up their archives for free re-use.

On 6 March, the entire image archive from the Swedish national agency, LSH (made up of three museums: The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum), was made available on the internet. All 40,000 images are published under open licences, about a third of them in high resolution. The release of the archive has attracted a lot of attention in Swedish social media.

In June 2012, we started the 'Open Image Archive' project. The objective was to make the museums’ image archives freely available to the public. The project consisted of three parts:

Develop the web interface for our collection database, in order to be able to display high resolution images.
Deliver linked open data and images to K-samsök - the Swedish national aggregator for cultural heritage data. This would allow users to collect and build new applications using the data.
Donate all of our high resolution images to Wikimedia Commons, in order to increase the reach of the material.

'Porträtt, karikatyr', from Skoklosters slott, public domain

Background

In early 2012, we launched the web interface for our collection database. This first stage enabled users to search for objects and people related to these objects. Each object record held one related image. The database contains about 90,000 object records and 40,000 related names of people and organisations. The data is licensed with the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain Dedication (CC0).

Up until the launch of Open Image Archive, the three museums had distributed images manually, through an FTP server solution. Just like most museums, we used to charge the users for both reproduction and usage rights. In January 2012, LSH decided that the images should be made public and available free of charge, since they have already been paid for through taxes and belong to the public. Now the work could really begin.

'Frukt- och grönsakshandel, Målning, Grönsaker', from Hallwylska museet, public domain

Objective

The objective of the Open Image Archive project was to ensure free access to our image collections and make it possible to use and re-use the images, in accordance with the expected expansion of the Directive on the re-use of public sector information. In order to maximise usability, the images need to be structured in a machine-readable format and be provided with all necessary metadata.

If a user is to make the most of this new openness, it has to be easy to find and re-use images. They need to be available for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. To achieve this, we had to:

Expand the existing web interface of our database with a new module which allowed us to display and structure all images, with or without object relations. We also needed a function for downloading high resolution images.
Process and correct image data and metadata, e.g. key words for increased searchability, licence templates and info about photographers.
Provide all images with licences, we have used CC BY-SA, CC0 and public domain.
Donate all high resolution images to Wikimedia Commons, linking back to our own database.

'Hjälmkrossare, Webbprojektet, Stämningsbild', from Livrustkammaren, CC-BY-SA

We are also one of three Swedish contributors to the Athena Plus project, meaning that we will soon be delivering linked open data to Europeana.

All digitised or digitally born images are made available free of charge for the user. Analogue images can be digitised on demand, at a marginal cost.

The result of this project is better quality data and increased possibilities for the use and re-use of our material, for example for children preparing school work, for innovators building applications or for researchers who can study objects closely, through high resolution images.

We hope that this will contribute to building a platform for an increased use of our cultural heritage and that people around the world will benefit from this step.