Linked Data: Smithsonian American Art Museum Announces Formation of American Art Collaborative

From the SI:

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. This will exponentially enhance the accessing, linking and sharing of information about American art in a way that transcends what is currently possible with structured data. The goals of the Initiative are to simplify access to digital information across museum collections for both researchers and the public, to increase the understanding and appreciation of American art, to create new opportunities for discovery, research and collaboration, to promote creative reuse of data on American art across numerous applications and to showcase for museums and other scholarly institutions the inherent possibilities of LOD.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is the lead museum for the Collaborative and will host the February meeting. The museum is at the forefront of museum-related digital initiatives and was one of the first American museums to make its entire collection available on the cloud via LOD. The museum’s online collection and database of authoritative research now connect to a growing body of related data published by organizations worldwide.

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The 14 museums participating in the Collaborative represent some of the most important collections of American Art in the world. Those museums are the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Crystal Bridges, Ark., the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, the Thomas Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla., the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyo., the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, N.J.; the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn., and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Read the Complete Announcement

See Also: Papers, Slides, and Other Materials Re: American Art Collaborative