This guest post was written by Lizzy Jongma, Data Manager at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and is part of a series building up to our GLAM-WIKI conference which takes place from 12-14 April at the British Library, London. Lizzy is delivering a keynote presentation at 13:45 on Friday 12 April.
Amsterdam, April 2nd 2013
Tuesday afternoon and I am looking out of my office window. It is situated in one of the 8 towers of the Rijksmuseum and it is one of the old boardrooms. It’s a beautiful room with a nice view on the western part of the museum gardens. The garden gates are still closed and everything looks serene. Silence before the storm. The last days before the museum will reopen after a decade of extensive renovations. My mind wanders off. Flowers, Dutch skies, sculptures. Objects from our collections.
The Rijksmuseum is all about art, about images, about sharing the best quality. So everyone can experience, discover, enjoy, zoom in, use etc. Digitisation and the internet gave us new opportunities to open our collections to a global audience. It gave us new possibilities to share images and information with audiences that can’t access our museum. Because it’s closed, because objects are stored or because they live in another part of the world. Over the last years the Rijksmuseum worked hard to achieve digital quality and openness: high res images on our new website; sharing, downloading and reusing objects in Rijksstudio and technical access for developers through the Rijks API. And ‘en passant’ my head was filled with thousands of hidden treasures.
Amsterdam, April 5th 2013
Friday morning. The day after the press opening. Journalists from all over the world came to see the museum… And they loved it! Images and films of our new galleries were broadcast in dozens of countries. Our website was visited by 54.000 unique visitors, visiting a staggering 421.000 pages. Rijksmuseum was 7th trending topic on twitter.
I am looking out of my window again and thinking about next Friday: GLAM-WIKI UK! Where I will present our digital strategies, projects and results. Share our experiences with online friends and visitors. The new friends we were able to make over the last decade. Just one day before our queen will open the museum on Saturday April 13th at 12 o’clock.