GLAM/Case studies/Open Art Images

[Open Art Images] conceived by the web designer Viviana Mei in team with Davide Strudthoff (management), Oleksandr Moccogni (digital marketing), Luisa D’Antonio (art historian and chief-editor), Anna Pirri Valentini (legal) and with the advice of Jandira Moreno do Nascimento (communication), is a search engine for high definition art images that collects materials from every era and from all over the world.

OAI aims to offer a valuable tool to all professionals working in the culture domain, but also to simple art lovers. All the images provided by this search engine are in open access and therefore can be reused to any purpose or context by users, in particular they can be used to make art by arts, to re-make art. The core idea, of course, is to contribute to the democratization of knowledge, trying to make more and more resources accessible to everybody. Many of these would otherwise remain hidden or difficult to find in the web.

Furthermore, the project maintains an open connotation, encourages users to actively act in order to improve and increase the number and quality of resources already available. The OAI database, however, does not replicate existing content, taking an ecological position in this sense: “OAI reuses and re-circulates resources and data already present on the web, looking for and recovering data instead of creating another database or duplicating data and resources”, we read in the presentation. Technically speaking, the system uses linked open data from the Wikimedia Commons database and in particular from its art fund.

The purpose of Open Art Images”, explain the authors, “Is to create a shared space dedicated to these images and common heritage. Open Art Images also aims to develop a research platform dedicated to the image as such and to the different ways of seeing. The image will be examined from the point of view of various disciplines and orientations, allowing the researcher to discover new ways of observing, looking and seeing images, to analyze and integrate them into our history, into our way of living and thinking”.