17. ‘ The Milkmaid’, one of Johannes Vermeer's most famous pieces, depicts a scene of a woman quietly pouring milk into a bowl. During a survey the Rijksmuseum discovered that there were over 10,000 copies of the image on the internet—mostly poor, yellowish reproductions1. As a result of all of these low-quality copies on the web, according to the Rijksmuseum, “people simply didn’t believe the postcards in our museum shop were showing the original painting. This was the trigger for us to put high-resolution images of the original work with open metadata on the web ourselves. Opening up our data is our best defence against the ‘yellow Milkmaid’.”
This helped shape our Strategic Plan 2011-2015 We developed it in close collaboration with our key stakeholders: Our data providers – the cultural heritage organisations of Europe The policy makers in the European Commission and national Ministries of Culture and Education Our end users Players in the wider online cultural heritage environment, including publishers and other content providers, software developers and apps designers They helped us focus on the value that they derived – or wanted to derive - from Europeana
The strategic plan comprises four tracks around which our activity turns and on which all our resources are focused
This means that we cannot publish your metadata as linked open data and make use of the magnificent possibilities of the semantic web. When it’s up in the cloud, everyone can copy and reuse them