The first picture entered for Wiki Loves Art in the Netherlands: a photo of a priest's ring, taken by Sindala in the Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum.
Restrictive museum photo policies can be a drag when you desperately want to test your new expensive camera on that one gorgeous work of art you’ve always wanted to see.
This month, the Van Gogh Museum, NEMO and the corporate art collection of the ING Bank will welcome volunteers who come to take photos of their collection for Wikipedia. It had already been announced that the Tropenmuseum, the Netherlands Institute for Media Art and the Jewish Historical Museum participate in the project. Volunteers will visit Dutch museums to take photographs of art objects, which will be published online and thus made available to the general public with a Creative Commons license.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic 'all rights reserved' copyright, dubbed 'some rights reserved'.
In the Netherlands, over 30 museums participate in
Wiki Loves Art, an initiative of Creative Commons Netherlands and Wikimedia Netherlands in collaboration with XS4ALL, Netherlands Heritage and the Museum Night Foundation. In a comparable project in America and the UK, 15 museums participated. Over 10,000 photos were already published on the
Flickr website. For online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, this is a way to obtain illustrations for articles. So far, mainly ethnic and classical art seems to have been photographed. In the Netherlands, museums with ethnic and craft objects participate, but also museums with media art and graphic design collections. On 1 September, the winner of a best photo award will be announced. Let the worry about the loss of postcard sales begin!
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