Visual resources course materials

Digital cultural heritage is cultural content that is available as high quality digital media or machine readable text. The content can be digital reproductions of original works such as works of art, photographs or documents. Museums, archives and libraries are digitising their collections and making them available for the public on different kinds of online platforms and databases. Authentic digital versions of works of art, photographs, drawings, objects and maps are often avilable in large aggregated databases.

Openness of cultural heritage increases use potential

Increasingly, when possible the materials are also published under an open license such as Creative Commons, or Public Domain when copyright has lapsed. When materials are reusable without technical or regulatory constraints, they allow creative combination and innovative editing. Audiences are also invited to enrich materials, for example, to increase the context information of archive material, or to share new content or interpretations of the material.

This is an authentic digital version provided by Rijksmuseumin Vermeeri's painting available in Europeana (not available with google search). Click the image!

Image: The Milkmaid, by Johannes Vermeer (Public Domain)

When searching the image with internet search engines, the result contains images that are cropped, the colours may have been changed or the image may have been manipulated in many other ways: 

The most reliable and high quality visual resources are therefore most often found in image databases not reached by internet search engines.