Sweden’s LSH publishes 40,000 images under open licenses

This week, Sweden’s Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle, and The Hallwyl Museum (LSH) released approximately 40,000 images under open licenses on their website. They are the second Swedish museums, after the Nordic Museum, to make this leap, thus placing them next to other OpenGLAM institutions such as the United States National Gallery of Art, the Rijksmuseum, and the Central Art Archives Finland.

These three museums, which join together to create one unit maintained by the Swedish government, is funded by the tax payers of Sweden.  These taxes go towards the digitization of collections and archival content, thus, as stated by Senior Curator Magnus Hagberg in this recent press release, these materials should be accessible to the public – and now they are.

Web visitors can browse the freely licensed collections, which fall under CC BY A, CC BY SA, and public domain licenses, through a custom “open” focused search. The open collection consists of approximately 40,000 images, with a quarter of the collection being available in high resolution. More high resolution images will be made available in the future. The collection ranges from fine art to weaponry from around the world.

LSH has also partnered with Wikimedia Sweden, who is assisting in making the high resolution images available on Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia’s free media repository, which supplies websites like Wikipedia with it’s images, videos and sound. This is one more way that LSH can disseminate it’s collection, which connects to its mission of making cultural heritage accessible to the world.

Welcome LSH to the OpenGLAM family! We are very happy to have you.