Large Scale Data Program

Overview

The Large Scale Data Program is a bespoke technical service, tailored to your institution's needs, provided by Google Arts & Culture.

This initiative is intended to help your institution share on the platform thousands of collection items online simply and rapidly.

Examples include:

And many more…

Benefits for your institution:

Sharing process automation:

Remove the need to manually insert metadata to Google Arts & Culture’s spreadsheet from your inventory system.
Automate image upload.
Possibility of keeping your collection on Google Arts & Culture synchronised with your inventory.

Organize your digital collection:

Let us assist in the preparation of your metadata into a standardised format, giving you the option to use it again.

Drive discovery of your collection:

In Google Search when people search for an artist, artwork or art movement (for example: Gustav Klimt, Starry Night or post-impressionism) In the Knowledge Panel you’ll see an interactive result that highlights ways you can explore on a deeper level. For some pieces, you can click through to see picture-perfect high-resolution imagery of your artworks, right from Google Arts & Culture. Read more about it here

Scope Process

Consultation

Initial discussions to review the assets your institution wishes to share.
Understanding your inventory system where your assets are currently stored.
Discussing any potential technical challenges.

Sharing

Custom software written by Google Arts & Culture to automate the process of sharing your assets.
Exploring possibilities of leveraging other Google technologies for your cultural institution.
Sharing examples to demonstrate best practices on Google Arts & Culture..

Launch

Once the assets have been shared, in Google Arts & Culture. dashboard you can:
- Select the items you wish to publish.
- Create exhibits.
- Update or remove assets.
An automated process can also be implemented to keep your content up to date on GA&C. Please speak to us if you are interested.

Data structure

Physical / Unstructured Data

If your information is someway without a standard or only physically organized, we can work with the options below:

Hard drive or other means of external storage with images and metadata which could be shipped.
Digital investigation of your database.
Shared Google Drive folder.

Digital / Structured Data

If your information is already digitally organized and inventoried, we can retrieve data from:

your management system.
a cloud storage.
your own internal server.

You can also upload the images and metadata to a cloud service and we will do the rest for you.

Automated

If you have an API or a data feed it is possible to create an automated way of sharing the assets. Creating a custom integration to your server will allow you to:

automate any metadata updates done in your internal inventory.
automate sharing of new content to the platform.
give users open access to your most up to date research about artworks.

If your situation is different from the ones described here, please ask your Google contact if you still could be part of the program.

Requirements

Metadata Quality:

Providing rich, detailed and informative metadata will help users to discover, interact with and learn about your items. We recommend you share as much detailed and comprehensive information as you have available. We can work with a number of common file formats. Please contact us to see if we can work with the file format you have available.

Image Quality:

Images need to satisfy the following requirements:

JPEG, PNG or single-image TIFF
2,500+ pixels on the shortest side of the image (4,000+ pixels recommended)
No more than 50 megabytes or 100 megapixels
No borders
No watermarks

How to join

If you have a digital collection archive (images and/or videos, with metadata) of at least 1,000 items, we can begin a conversation to understand how we might help with:

Preparing and organizing your metadata (titles, descriptions, etc)
Advising on image digitization
Organizing your content onto the Google Cloud Platform and Google Arts & Culture

We are able to work with a wide variety of archive formats and assets and we are piloting this comprehensive service for a limited period. Please contact your Google Arts & Culture lead for any questions

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