Wednesday, 9 May 2012

Thousands of high quality freely available images from a Baltimore Museum



The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is internationally renowned for its collection of art . It offers an overview of world art from pre-dynastic Egypt to 20th-century Europe, and counts among its many treasures Greek sculpture and Roman sarcophagi; medieval ivories and Old Master paintings; Art Deco jewelry and 19th-century European and American masterpieces.
In 2011, the Walters launched a redesigned works of art website with 10,000 online artwork images freely licensed under a Creative Commons license.
 Apart from their image rich website,  works of art from this museum have been donated as  19,000 + freely-licensed images  to WikimediaCommons. This is one of the largest and most comprehensive such releases made by any museum.
The images and their associated information join the collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which make up the image repository for Wikipedia.

The image donation is part of the Walters Museum’s larger initiative to provide free public access to its collection, both online and offline, beginning with the removal of admission fees in 2006.

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