My Word with Douglas E. Welch

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art gallery in the United States. It has over two million works of art in its permanent collection.

The Met 360° Project is a series of six 360° movies which allow you to explore the museum and some of its galleries. The videos include tours of the Great Hall, the Met Cloisters and the Charles Engelhard Court. As each video plays you can pan around 360°, just like you can in Google Maps Street View.

The National Air and Space Museum currently houses more than 38,640 pages of material spanning Sally Ride’s career as a physicist, astronaut, and educator. There’s just one big issue with the massive collection: the majority of it is handwritten or typed on a typewriter and isn’t searchable.

The museum estimates that all of the content takes up roughly 23 cubic feet; however, it can be hard to search, and hard to access.

The Smithsonian Institution is releasing 2.8 million high-res images from its massive collection into the public domain, putting them online for anyone to use and download for free. The open-access online platform will include 2D and 3D images from its 19 museums, nine research centers, archives, libraries, and the National Zoo, Smithsonian Magazine reports.

“Being a relevant source for people who are learning around the world is key to our mission,” Effie Kapsalis, the Smithsonian’s senior digital program officer, says. “We can’t imagine what people are going to do with the collections. We’re prepared to be surprised.”

Mitch Yockelson knows what’s missing by heart. There’s an arsenal of diamond-encrusted daggers, swords, and scabbards gifted to Harry Truman by a Saudi prince and the Iranian shah—all stolen from his presidential library in 1978. There’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s official White House portrait. It went missing in a move. And there’s a batch of Abraham Lincoln’s telegrams that just up and vanished.

Yockelson, the investigative archivist for the U.S. National Archives, is unlikely to find any of these priceless historical treasures in a fluorescent-lit hall on the Maryland state fairgrounds. The annual Maryland Antique Arms Show brings together hundreds of dealers peddling all types of military antiques and ephemera. There, men toting bayonets for sale peruse table after table of old uniforms, yellowed discharge papers, and bowls of ammunition. Yockelson attends shows like this two or three times a year, in addition to scouring online auctions and following tips, on the hunt for lost Americana that rightfully belongs to the U.S. government.

It’s becoming more and more common for museums to digitize their collections. The latest one to join the trend is The Cleveland Museum of Art. After digitizing its collection, it made it publicly accessible online, with 30,000 images free for download and remix.

The CMA has shared the images from its permanent collection that are in the public domain open access. This means that you can download, share, reproduce, reuse and remix the images for scholarly, non-commercial, but also commercial purposes.

The CMA’s director, William Griswold, said in a statement regarding this project: