With ‘Open Access,’ the Met Museum’s Digital Operation Has a Bona Fide Hit on Its Hands; artnetnews, August 10, 2017

Sarah Cascone, artnetnews; With ‘Open Access,’ the Met Museum’s Digital Operation Has a Bona Fide Hit on Its Hands

"In February, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it was pursuing a new Open Access policy—releasing high-resolution imagery of all its public-domain works (over 375,000 in total). Six months later, the new initiative has had a major impact on sites such as Wikimedia and Creative Commons, and the museum is continuing to branch out. This week, the Met announced a partnership with Google’s data analytics platform, BigQuery.

“During what is just the dawn of this new initiative, the responses so far have been incredible,” wrote Loic Tallon, the museum’s chief digital officer, in a blog post.

The numbers speak for themselves. According to Tallon, the Met’s website has seen a 64 percent increase in image downloads since Open Access was implemented, as well as a 17 percent bump in traffic to the online collection. Users who download photographs are now spending five times as long on the site."