Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogue rights statements

This came through my Instagram stream

Have you heard the latest gossip about book collecting?! Okay maybe not the latest… This 2-volume set was written by The Met’s very first librarian, William Loring Andrews, and was published in 1900. Both volumes are available for free online through our Digital Collections. #gossip #bookcollecting #bookcollector #bookcollectors #collecting #librarian #bookbinding

A post shared by Thomas J. Watson Library (@metlibrary) on Dec 27, 2017 at 10:36am PST

So I made my way to the relevant opac, and searched the catalogue, ending up here.

I was impressed by the very clear rights statements, see below:

Copyright Status	public domain
Copyright Notice	Material is in the public domain. No restrictions on use.
Copyright Information	The Libraries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art make digital versions of collections accessible for research purposes in the following situations: They are in the public domain; the rights are owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art; we have permission to make them accessible; we make them accessible as a fair use, or there are no known restrictions on use. To learn what your responsibilities are if you'd like to use the materials, go to http://www.metmuseum.org/information/terms-and-conditions

It was useful that this information was clear. I have only looked at this example and have not further explored the catalogue.

It is something that libraries should always consider - how to make accurate rights statements clear and easy to find for people who want to further use material.  I continue to be frustrated by organisations which state that material which is out of copyright is in copyright.

As an aside the library has a very interesting blog, and you can explore the other museum blogs here.

A few thoughts on The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures

The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures by Library of Congress
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an impressive account of one card catalogue, that of the Library of Congress. The illustrations include items from the Library of Congress matched with their card catalogue records, which is lovely. It is also an account of the card distribution service, which sounds massive, and the change to electronic catalogues. I now want to read a more general history of cataloguing , not what I expected to feel like reading.

This is an enjoyable, pacy read.

View all my reviews

Discovery by colour and shape

I like to see how different places are making shape and or colour searching possible, like the Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek and their image based similarity search.  This is really interesting to explore as you look for things like the the shape/image chosen.  

Along with the many other wonderful things the Cooper Hewitt Museum is doing, there is a colour browsing/discovery for part of their collection database.

You do a search (or use one of their many discovery/browse options), and under each object which has a digitised image on the website there are up to five coloured squares, reflecting the main colours in the item.  There is an option to select all colours and see difference colour schema used to describe the colours. From here you can click on any colour, and you will be taken to other items containing the same colour. This is lovely, and it is very tempting to keep trying different colours  (and I quite like their Please don't steal our images, yeah? on the main image page for each item).  There are lots of other ways the items are connected for browsing/discovery such as the medium where you are also prompted about similar things.  This is very helpful.

Make sure you scroll to the end of the item page as there are ways which you can connect your images with the images online (through unique tags for each item).

I also like the way the content is shown here with percentages of the online collections includes in the data.

This is really a lovely catalogue/database to play with, and you can share the items on Pinterest, Tumblr or Twitter (but it would be rather fun if you could embed them with all the metadata attached - and I may have missed that this is possible amongst all the other wonderful things you can do).

There is a Random button to click which delivers (not surprisingly) a random collection item.