Final Project: Dutch Art Across the US
Representing Dutch Art collections across the US
Problem Statement/Research Question: Dutch Art collections exist at many museums, large and small, in private collections and at other sites in the US. However, it is currently impossible to obtain a comprehensive overview of, let alone digital access to all holdings of Dutch art in the US. How can we create an innovative online collection of Dutch art in the US?
Data Sources: There are a number of online collections but they all provide different structures of metadata, image versions of the art work, and access policies. Some information only exists on comouters at Museums and collections and is not yet accessible on the Internet. Here’s a list of some collections:
RID – National Institute for Art History in The Hague, Netherlands. As an example. https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/images This began as photo documentation.
MFA https://collections.mfa.org/collections
National Gallery https://www.nga.gov/collection.html
Met https://www.metmuseum.org/art/the-collection
Philadelphia https://philamuseum.org/collection
Harvard Art Museums https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections
Detroit https://dia.org/collection
Getty https://www.getty.edu/art/
Cleveland https://www.clevelandart.org/art/collection/search
Worcester https://worcester.emuseum.com/collections
LACMA https://collections.lacma.org/
**Audience: ** Art historians, scholars of dutch art, art students, museum curators, donors, interested general audience
Inspirations: THE RIJKSMUSEUM in Amsterdam, arguably one of the best art museum websites: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en
Skills needed: Compuational skills: Web scraping, API access, database, JavaScript, CSS, etc. Design Skills: innovative UI/UX, data representation, visialization, focus on user interaction Data Skills: research, metadata & cleanup
Note: This project is part of a collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.