Displaying items by tag: data

The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced today the creation of The American Art Collaborative (AAC), a consortium of 14 American museums committed to building the next generation of digital searches and scholarly advancement. Members of the Collaborative are meeting in Washington, D.C., this week to move from planning to implementation of their Linked Open Data Initiative, which seeks to expand the possibilities inherent in linking museum collections through Linked Open Data (LOD).

The Collaborative plans to create a diverse critical mass of LOD on the Web on the subject of American art by putting the collections of the participating museums in the cloud and tagging this data as LOD.

Maxwell Anderson, the Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, announced today the launch of an exciting redesigned digital database for the Museum’s collection of encyclopedic art through its website, DMA.org. This marks the first phase of an initiative to dramatically improve online access and representation of the Museum’s global collection of more than 22,000 works of art.

By digitizing its entire collection, the DMA is creating one of the world’s most sophisticated online art collections, providing open access to its entire collection, and leading the field in the quality and depth of content available to visitors, students, teachers, and scholars. In addition, whenever permitted by existing agreements, the DMA will release all images, data, and software it creates to the public under Open Access licenses for free personal and educational use.

There are roughly 11,000 Starbucks locations in the United States, and about 14,000 McDonald's restaurants. But combined, the two chains don't come close to the number of museums in the U.S., which stands at a whopping 35,000.

So says the latest data release from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent government agency that tallies the number and type of museums in this country. By their count the 35,000 active museums represent a doubling from the number estimated in the 1990s.