Huge trove of Smithsonian art digitized; over 40,000 works

Over the holiday, the Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler art galleries put more than 40,000 works of art online; that’s their entire collection available for high-resolution download. Here’s the announcement on their blog.

We’ve digitized our entire collection and today, we’re making it available to the public. That’s thousands of works now ready for you to download, modify, and share for noncommercial purposes. As Freer|Sackler Director Julian Raby said, “We strive to promote the love and study of Asian art, and the best way we can do so is to free our unmatched resources for inspiration, appreciation, academic study, and artistic creation.”

Great to see galleries and museums doing this sort of thing, e.g. the Met and all the institutions participating in The Commons at Flickr. (via the verge)

• art