In an effort to make information more freely available and answer the growing demand for open data Penn Libraries have made some of their cultural heritage materials available for free downloads as high-resolution images along with machine-readable descriptive and technical metadata about the images via their OPenn digital resources website. Looking at the site I see that they are not kidding about the images being high-resolution, I downloaded one of them just to see how it looked and it was a 3400×4444 image file 45MB in size.
From their press release:
Images from items such as a 16th-century Portolan Atlas and a unique book of Ciphers made for Pope Calixtus III in the 15th century are available on OPenn.
More datasets, including manuscripts from Penn’s own holdings and items from other institutions, will be added in the near future. Historic diaries from a variety of Institutions belonging to the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries are next in line for inclusion on OPenn. Many of these documents are unknown while others are celebrated, such as the Union League of Philadelphia’s Tanner manuscript, a unique firsthand account of the events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
â€Allowing all those who wish to use data from the site to do so, in whatever way they desire and without requiring them to ask for permission, creates boundless possibility and an exciting unpredictability surrounding the outcomes,†said Will Noel, director of Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
It’s good to see more and more libraries making their works available online for free. It can only help with spreading the knowledge.
– Suramya