Next week, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose Open Access initiative makes more 375,000 public-domain items from its collection available for free and unrestricted use, is conducting a Wikidata seminar that will help to make open access a reality elsewhere.

This two-part event will explore the potential and value of opening up institutional collections and data to the public, and will kick off with a panel and workshop featuring a team of experts who will introduce Wikidata: what it is, how it works, why it matters, and how to use it. While the seminar is designed for institutional collections, it is not restricted.

Starting at 12:30 pm, a panel of open data experts, including Effie Kapsalis, Chief of Content and Communications Strategy, Smithsonian Institution Archives; Richard Knipel, Wikimedian-in-Residence, The Met; and Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution: How A Bunch of Nobodies Created The World's Greatest Encyclopedia will conduct a discussion on the fine points of Wiki. This will be followed by a hands-on workshop where attendees will learn how to put Wikidata to use in their own collections.

Eugène Atget (1857-1927). left: Avenue des Gobelins, 1927. right: rue de la Cimitiere, Benoit, c 1920s

H.C. White Co., Garden of the Gods, Colorado, U.S.A., 1906

The workshop will be followed by a panel conducted by Katherine Maher, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation and Loic Tallon, Chief Digital Officer, The Met, moderated by Dennis K. Berman, Business Editor, The Wall Street Journal. The seminar takes place on Tuesday, February 13, from 12:30-5 pm.  Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY For more information, and to register for this free event, go here.

Out of curiosity, I browsed The Met’s photography collection and found that more than 91 public-domain images by Eugène Atget are available for unrestricted use, in the form of 2.2MB jpegs [top]. Of the nearly 46,000 photographs in The Met collection, there are 612 stereographs, most of which are public-domain images, including this c. 1905 view of the Garden of the Gods [above], a gift from Weston J. Naef. Among the photographs donated by Naef to The Met collection are a group of 107 stereographs views of animals, including the oddity below, made by the Keystone View Company.