Smithsonian Announces Major Grant From Mellon Foundation To Support Linked Open Data Initiative

The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced today that the Smithsonian Institution has received a grant of $375,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to underwrite the implementation of major objectives in its Linked Open Data Initiative. These objectives include coding museum collection information as linked open data, the development of open-source tools and a demonstration application, and the publication of best practices for other museums interested in linked open data.

Linked open data is a method of publishing information to the Web under an open license using technologies that interconnect related pieces of metadata, making information significantly richer and easier to find.

“Many museums lack the resources to implement linked open data on their own, and this initiative will provide guidance and a foundation for more of the museum community to participate in the future of research on American art,” said Betsy Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “We are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their ongoing support of this innovative project.”

Museums participating in the initiative are part of the American Art Collaborative (AAC), a consortium of 14 American museums committed to advancing scholarship and public engagement with American art through building the next generation of digital searches. The Smithsonian American Art Museum is the lead museum for the Collaborative and will administer the grant.

The Collaborative intends to share best practices, guidelines and case studies with the broader museum community with the aim of building a network of museum practitioners continually contributing information about works of art in their collections to the linked open data cloud. The Collaborative will publish research and collection information as linked open data, creating unprecedented access to digital information across museum collections for both researchers and the public, generating much more precise results for Web searches and digital applications and enabling museums to uncover new and meaningful connections among works in their own collections and those of partner institutions.

“This grant supports a critical stage of the Linked Open Data Initiative and establishes sustainable approaches that other museums can follow,” said Eleanor Fink, an independent digital heritage expert who manages and helped found the Collaborative.

A grant from the Mellon Foundation awarded to the Smithsonian in July 2014 supported a nine-month planning and training period for AAC museums, followed by a national leadership grant awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art on behalf of the AAC in September 2015 to fund data conversion, the first step of the Initiative.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is at the forefront of museum-related digital initiatives and was one of the first American museums to make its entire collection available on the cloud via linked open data. The museum’s online collection and database of authoritative research now connect to a growing body of related data published by organizations worldwide.

In addition to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, AAC includes the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, the Thomas Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla., the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyo., the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, N.J., the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven., Conn. 

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