50 Years of Art Books from the Met, for Free Download | Hacker News Reader

50 Years of Art Books from the Met, for Free Download

metmuseum.org

450 pointsbrudgers38 comments

Several hundred publications from the Getty Museum (and the other research arms of the Getty) are available for free download as well: https://www.getty.edu/publications/virtuallibrary/

(I work at the Getty Research Institute)

Just since I've got your eye, and you'll get a chuckle out of the bug - it appears that the title listing pages don't handle unicode correctly:

"Fernand Khnopff: Portrait of Jeanne K\xE9fer"

http://www.getty.edu/Search/VirtualLibrary?title=&author=Mic...

Click on the title, and the book details page renders correctly.

Please use responsibly. Recommended to delay by a few days - it seems like there is an initial surge going on right now. Increase download delay to 20 sec - 1 minute. Be respectful.

https://github.com/ilyaperepelitsa/met_book_downloader

Is there a torrent of this so I could help host?

P.S. it will take hours or days =))) <3 <3 <3

Has anyone downloaded all the books? How much data is it combined?

I'm at 300 right now, 9.5 gigs. I think some are skipped cause the download times out (can redownload manually I suppose)

21 Gigs in total for everything, ignoring errors (files too big / broken links)

Not that bad, I was expecting much bigger files.

This is probably one of the best things I've seen posted in HN. Art books, aside from the actual art, contain essays written by academics or experts not found in Wikipedia or similar. They're also printed in small amounts and fairly expensive (e.g. books on exhibitions are $50-70).

This kind of project opens up a lot of knowledge to the general public.

Now if we could get more Kenneth Clark books reprinted...

FYI: The Rijksmuseum in Netherlands has their entire collection digitised and available. It was mentioned here a while back.

Totally agree - the essays/papers/artist ephemera in most of these books are impossible to find and rarely reprinted. I've always found it strange that looking at art is pretty common but reading/talking about art in a critical way is seen as too academic/inaccessible for most people. I hope that by putting this stuff into the public domain more people get excited about Art History - it's a super interesting field that has a lot to offer and learning how to do visual analysis is pretty useful in a ton of different fields.

For me, when I walk through an art museum, my favorite "description" tags are one that are objective - "here's what this art is depicting (if it's not clear), here's some neat historical context, maybe here's a little bit of what the artist said about the work or how it was received."

But then there's tags (at least in MFAH) that were obviously written by someone else and are completely subjective. My favorite one to lambast is just a painting of a black square on a white background, and the description is a 400 word essay about how the work "challenges the boundaries of man" and other phrases that to me are nonsense.

I get that it's easy to pick on Modern Art but I feel sticking to the objective is still possible in that field.

The Bulletins are nice. I particularly enjoy the "recent acquisitions" Bulletins they put out to showcase the highlights of what they've added in the last couple years. Those cover objects from broad swaths of history, from antiquity right up to near-present day.

They say a bit about each object and usually include something about why it was an important item to add to their collection. Some nice perspectives in there.

If his civilisation television series is anything to go by, probably not the best person to read as far as learning about history goes.

Would anybody who's familiar with some items from the collection care to give a top three (or so) for those of us who don't know where to start?

Uploading a scrapy crawler that downloads PDF books to github in a few hours, gonna post the link here

Please put a copy up on the InternetArchive as well!

Now I understand why it's so slow.

It's slow cause things are quite large there (just saw a 2 gig book). I'm using delays, don't worry - hence "in a few hours" <3 <3 <3

I think someone else is messing with it - got slower for me too.

the real MVP right here

Does anyone have leads to other collections like this?

What’s the policy on using these images in blog posts or social media?

It's well explained in their terms and conditions page.

Material not in the public domain they allow noncommercial reuse with some caveats.

https://www.metmuseum.org/information/terms-and-conditions

Thanks. Would be nice if the CC0 images could be found via https://search.creativecommons.org

You can search metmuseum.org itself and they have a filter for public domain paintings. (Use the search bar at the top then after searching click the "The Collection" tab, and the filter will appear.)

I had the idea of Google selfie Art a few years ago and did it with a small team for a museum in Hamburg (open data). I would love to do it for the MET museum as well. I tried some real time face tracking in opencv aswell. The app is called zeitblick. It’s more or less a prototype, maybe some of you will have a joy for interacting with art data creatively :)

I'm in the process of creating a web app for exploring art along historical timelines, and was wanting to pair each work up with critique/theory writings that reference it. This is exactly what I need. Thanks for posting!

I’m surprised that they don’t charge, especially given the high quality.

When you visit, they give you a real hard sell and guilt trip for their “recommended donation”. They should make access to this a perk of membership.

Maybe there's some accounting thing where each download helps them meet a charitable requirement or something.

Or maybe they take their educational mission seriously and this is a really low marginal cost way to do it.

I'm really happy their share it though. The collection is just amazing - it's a good idea for "what books to buy for a personal library when you start making decent money". Definitely would spend money on things like this at their store if they sell them.

hrmm, some of the reproductions in the photography books are of pretty poor quality.

Wow! Thank you.

Didn't know that MetArt is so old...

The met was established in 1870.

He was referring to a different "MetArt". Not worksafe ...

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