Rijksmuseum

The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.

We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.

The Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum dedicated to art and history. Founded in 1800 in the Netherlands

Revenue model: grants and government funding, charging for in-person version

(museum admission), selling merchandise

Interview date: December 11, 2015

Interviewee: Lizzy Jongma, the data manager of the collections information department

Profile written by Paul Stacey

The Rijksmuseum, a national museum in the Netherlands dedicated to art and history, has been housed in its current building since 1885. The monumental building enjoyed more than 125 years of intensive use before needing a thorough overhaul. In 2003, the museum was closed for renovations. Asbestos was found in the roof, and although the museum was scheduled to be closed for only three to four years, renovations ended up taking ten years. During this time, the collection was moved to a different part of Amsterdam, which created a physical distance with the curators. Out of necessity, they started digitally photographing the collection and creating metadata (information about each object to put into a database). With the renovations going on for so long, the museum became largely forgotten by the public. Out of these circumstances emerged a new and more open model for the museum.

By the time Lizzy Jongma joined the Rijksmuseum in 2011 as a data manager, staff were fed up with the situation the museum was in. They also realized that even with the new and larger space, it still wouldn’t be able to show very much of the whole collection — eight thousand of over one million works representing just 1 percent. Staff began exploring ways to express themselves, to have something to show for all of the work they had been doing. The Rijksmuseum is primarily funded by Dutch taxpayers, so was there a way for the museum provide benefit to the public while it was closed? They began thinking about sharing Rijksmuseum’s collection using information technology. And they put up a card-catalog like database of the entire collection online.

It was effective but a bit boring. It was just data. A hackathon they were invited to got them to start talking about events like that as having potential. They liked the idea of inviting people to do cool stuff with their collection. What about giving online access to digital representations of the one hundred most important pieces in the Rijksmuseum collection? That eventually led to why not put the whole collection online?

Then, Lizzy says, Europeana came along. Europeana is Europe’s digital library, museum, and archive for cultural heritage.1 As an online portal to museum collections all across Europe, Europeana had become an important online platform. In October 2010 Creative Commons released CC0 and its public-domain mark as tools people could use to identify works as free of known copyright. Europeana was the first major adopter, using CC0 to release metadata about their collection and the public domain mark for millions of digital works in their collection. Lizzy says the Rijksmuseum initially found this change in business practice a bit scary, but at the same time it stimulated even more discussion on whether the Rijksmuseum should follow suit.

They realized that they don’t “own” the collection and couldn’t realistically monitor and enforce compliance with the restrictive licensing terms they currently had in place. For example, many copies and versions of Vermeer’s Milkmaid (part of their collection) were already online, many of them of very poor quality. They could spend time and money policing its use, but it would probably be futile and wouldn’t make people stop using their images online. They ended up thinking it’s an utter waste of time to hunt down people who use the Rijksmuseum collection. And anyway, restricting access meant the people they were frustrating the most were schoolkids.

In 2011 the Rijksmuseum began making their digital photos of works known to be free of copyright available online, using Creative Commons CC0 to place works in the public domain. A medium-resolution image was offered for free, but a high-resolution version cost forty euros. People started paying, but Lizzy says getting the money was frequently a nightmare, especially from overseas customers. The administrative costs often offset revenue, and income above costs was relatively low. In addition, having to pay for an image of a work in the public domain from a collection owned by the Dutch government (i.e., paid for by the public) was contentious and frustrating for some. Lizzy says they had lots of fierce debates about what to do.

In 2013 the Rijksmuseum changed its business model. They Creative Commons licensed their highest-quality images and released them online for free. Digitization still cost money, however; they decided to define discrete digitization projects and find sponsors willing to fund each project. This turned out to be a successful strategy, generating high interest from sponsors and lower administrative effort for the Rijksmuseum. They started out making 150,000 high-quality images of their collection available, with the goal to eventually have the entire collection online.

Releasing these high-quality images for free reduced the number of poor-quality images that were proliferating. The high-quality image of Vermeer’s Milkmaid, for example, is downloaded two to three thousand times a month. On the Internet, images from a source like the Rijksmuseum are more trusted, and releasing them with a Creative Commons CC0 means they can easily be found in other platforms. For example,

Sharing these images online creates what Lizzy calls the “Mona Lisa effect,” where a work of art becomes so famous that people want to see it in real life by visiting the actual museum.

Every museum tends to be driven by the number of physical visitors. The Rijksmuseum is primarily publicly funded, receiving roughly 70 percent of its operating budget from the government. But like many museums, it must generate the rest of the funding through other means. The admission fee has long been a way to generate revenue generation, including for the Rijksmuseum.

As museums create a digital presence for themselves and put up digital representations of their collection online, there’s frequently a worry that it will lead to a drop in actual physical visits. For the Rijksmuseum, this has not turned out to be the case. Lizzy told us the Rijksmuseum used to get about one million visitors a year before closing and now gets more than two million a year. Making the collection available online has generated publicity and acts as a form of marketing. The Creative Commons mark encourages reuse as well. When the image is found on protest leaflets, milk cartons, and children’s toys, people also see what museum the image comes from and this increases the museum’s visibility.

In 2011 the Rijksmuseum received €1 million from the Dutch lottery to create a new web presence that would be different from any other museum’s. In addition to redesigning their main website to be mobile friendly and responsive to devices like the iPad, the Rijksmuseum also created the Rijksstudio, where users and artists could use and do various things with the Rijksmuseum collection.2

The Rijksstudio gives users access to over two hundred thousand high-quality digital representations of masterworks from the collection. Users can zoom in to any work and even clip small parts of images they like. Rijksstudio is a bit like Pinterest. You can “like” works and compile your personal favorites, and you can share them with friends or download them free of charge. All the images in the Rijksstudio are copyright and royalty free, and users are encouraged to use them as they like, for private or even commercial purposes.

Users have created over 276,000 Rijksstudios, generating their own themed virtual exhibitions on a wide variety of topics ranging from tapestries to ugly babies and birds. Sets of images have also been created for educational purposes including use for school exams.

Some contemporary artists who have works in the Rijksmuseum collection contacted them to ask why their works were not included in the Rijksstudio. The answer was that contemporary artists’ works are still bound by copyright. The Rijksmuseum does encourage contemporary artists to use a Creative Commons license for their works, usually a CC BY-SA license

(Attribution-ShareAlike), or a CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) if they want to preclude commercial use. That way, their works can be made available to the public, but within limits the artists have specified.

The Rijksmuseum believes that art stimulates entrepreneurial activity. The line between creative and commercial can be blurry. As Lizzy says, even Rembrandt was commercial, making his livelihood from selling his paintings. The Rijksmuseum encourages entrepreneurial commercial use of the images in Rijksstudio. They’ve even partnered with the DIY marketplace Etsy to inspire people to sell their creations. One great example you can find on Etsy is a kimono designed by Angie Johnson, who used an image of an elaborate cabinet along with an oil painting by Jan Asselijn called The Threatened Swan.3

In 2013 the Rijksmuseum organized their first high-profile design competition, known as the Rijksstudio Award.4 With the call to action Make Your Own Masterpiece, the competition invites the public to use Rijksstudio images to make new creative designs. A jury of renowned designers and curators selects ten finalists and three winners. The final award comes with a prize of €10,000. The second edition in 2015 attracted a staggering 892 top-class entries. Some award winners end up with their work sold through the Rijksmuseum store, such as the 2014 entry featuring makeup based on a specific color scheme of a work of art.5 The Rijksmuseum has been thrilled with the results. Entries range from the fun to the weird to the inspirational. The third international edition of the Rijksstudio Award started in September 2016.

For the next iteration of the Rijksstudio, the Rijksmuseum is considering an upload tool, for people to upload their own works of art, and enhanced social elements so users can interact with each other more.

Going with a more open business model generated lots of publicity for the Rijksmuseum. They were one of the first museums to open up their collection (that is, give free access) with high-quality images. This strategy, along with the many improvements to the Rijksmuseum’s website, dramatically increased visits to their website from thirty-five thousand visits per month to three hundred thousand.

The Rijksmuseum has been experimenting with other ways to invite the public to look at and interact with their collection. On an international day celebrating animals, they ran a successful bird-themed event. The museum put together a showing of two thousand works that featured birds and invited bird-watchers to identify the birds depicted. Lizzy notes that while museum curators know a lot about the works in their collections, they may not know about certain details in the paintings such as bird species. Over eight hundred different birds were identified, including a specific species of crane bird that was unknown to the scientific community at the time of the painting.

For the Rijksmuseum, adopting an open business model was scary. They came up with many worst-case scenarios, imagining all kinds of awful things people might do with the museum’s works. But Lizzy says those fears did not come true because “ninety-nine percent of people have respect for great art.” Many museums think they can make a lot of money by selling things related to their collection. But in Lizzy’s experience, museums are usually bad at selling things, and sometimes efforts to generate a small amount of money block something much bigger — the real value that the collection has. For Lizzy, clinging to small amounts of revenue is being penny-wise but pound-foolish. For the Rijksmuseum, a key lesson has been to never lose sight of its vision for the collection. Allowing access to and use of their collection has generated great promotional value — far more than the previous practice of charging fees for access and use. Lizzy sums up their experience: “Give away; get something in return. Generosity makes people happy to join you and help out.”

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