The New Rijksmuseum Research Data Repository: On November 18, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will officially launch the Rijksmuseum Research Data Repository, presenting its new Dataverse-based infrastructure for managing and openly sharing research data. This represents a major milestone for one of the world’s most iconic museums on its journey toward Open Science and the enhancement of digital cultural heritage, as well as an important step in the Rijksmuseum’s ambition to make its research data increasingly accessible worldwide.
The platform
The New Rijksmuseum Research Data Repository: The first Dataverse collection presented during the launch will be dedicated to Operation Night Watch, the landmark research and conservation project focused on Rembrandt’s masterpiece, The Night Watch. It will provide a tangible example of how open research data can contribute to the dissemination of knowledge, information, and data relating to cultural heritage.
For the Rijksmuseum, making research data available is not an end in itself. By sharing its data, the museum aims to make research more transparent and enable others to build upon it. Data collected to answer one research question can therefore generate new questions, applications, and collaborations.
The new platform provides scalability, reliability, and long-term sustainability, addressing the continuously evolving needs of researchers, curators, and the broader academic community.
The background
For many years, the Rijksmuseum has pursued an open-data policy, making an extraordinary wealth of information available to developers, researchers, and enthusiasts through its services. This includes metadata relating to more than 800,000 objects, hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images, bibliographic catalogues, and controlled vocabularies—all provided in accordance with the FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
With Dataverse, the open-source application for sharing, preserving, citing, exploring, and analysing research data—which provides persistent identifiers and stable links between publications and datasets—the museum is taking another step toward the sustainable, long-term management of its knowledge assets.
Sharing the research data generated by Operation Night Watch represents an important first step. Over the coming years, the Rijksmuseum plans to make an increasing amount of research data from other research and conservation projects sustainably available through the Rijksmuseum Research Data Repository.
4Science is proud to have implemented the Rijksmuseum’s new repository, placing its expertise in open-knowledge infrastructure at the service of one of the world’s leading cultural institutions.
👉 Explore the new repository: Rijksmuseum RDR