Metropolitan Museum partners with Internet Archive to digitize 140,000 artworks

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has partnered with Internet Archive to make over 140,000 artworks available online under Creative Commons licenses. The collaboration places the Met among the most active cultural institutions on the web, offering scholars and enthusiasts access to hundreds of art books and hundreds of thousands of images. The digital collection spans from the 16th century to mid-20th-century New York, including Japanese approaches to French photography, Belgian graphic posters for American cinema, handicrafts from Iran to Peru, Chinese silk paintings, Japanese prints, and European Old Master paintings. Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco with data centers in Redwood City and Mountain View, has been active since 1996 and hosts over 13 million freely accessible books. Its mission is to preserve digital artifacts and create an internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Met joins other partners such as the Brooklyn Museum, NASA, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. The initiative follows the MoMA's online archive of all its exhibitions.