Hi!

James - As mentioned, the available aggregators at the moment are Europeana and WikiData. For the latter, please check: http://wdq.wmflabs.org If someone can help you with querying WikiData -or you can figure it out yourself-, it is the best as it is a superset of Europeana. We have a Wikipedian advising us, I can bring you in touch with him if you like, to help you with WikiData queries, because I personally find them very complex. If you use WikiData please make sure you filter out the artwork entries that don't have an image, because there are a few thousands of them. 

What we did at USEUM differently, is that, whatever we make available for download on USEUM, is fully copyright-vetted, for any country around the world and also for any type of use, including commercial. We will be speeding up the release of new batches, however it requires some "manual" work and at the moment we are running on low resources. The only reason we took this approach is because we thought it will be more meaningful to group these available artworks in themed groups, instead of saying e.g. 1,000 paintings from the NGA.

Mia, Danny - thanks for your questions. 

First, I would like to clarify that regarding the artworks available for "Download", as mentioned previously on USEUM we only include the artworks we have fully vetted in terms of IP. As Melissa mentioned, I also found it very frustrating that every once in a while, I would read a press release about 100K artworks made free, but after reading the small print I would realise there were all sorts of strings attached. Additionally, for all artworks on USEUM that belong to museums we are linking them either to the respective artwork page of the museum's website, or to the respective Wikimedia entry, which also makes clear where the artwork and its image come from.

What is in it for museums

> Regarding Open Content:
There has been some research hinting that some of the museums that were bold enough to do it, benefitted from that move in the long-term despite losing the licensing revenue stream in the short term. In case in the future, some case studies prove that with numbers -which as far as I am aware has not been done yet-, then this would convince more museums that there is more to win than to lose by sharing.

> Regarding USEUM:
I would like to reply that with a short story. The Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art -which hosts the Kostakis collection, one of the most important collections of Russian Avant Garde- approached us at a time when we were only exhibiting contemporary art on USEUM working with participant artists. One of their board members had been in one of my presentations and was interested in the print-on-demand merchandise aspect we were offering to artists and asked us whether we could offer the same feature to museums. We finally managed to launch a pilot of this feature "The Infinite Museum Shop" only a few weeks ago and it has been embraced by nearly all major museums in Greece and we have started discussions with various museums here too.
1. So as far as "The Infinite Museum Shop" feature is concerned, not only museums have an extra revenue stream with no upfront investment, but -especially for the smaller museums that don't already have a shop- they can also serve their visitors, who are able to order any artwork of their collection on any product (e.g. iPhone case, tote bag and more).
2. Meeting with the State Museum of Contemporary Art recently, what they were even more interested in, was that their profile page on USEUM we had created with just 15 of their paintings on USEUM had attracted 10,000 visitors from all around the world without them doing anything. They told us that the "extroversion" of their art collection, as they put it, was of equal or even higher importance for them.

So to answer your questions yes museums do profit financially from USEUM and we also direct all visitors to the respective museum's artwork entry. Mia, sure, we would be more than happy to share statistics if museums are interested in that, once we have sufficient resources to build such Insights features.

Last, Danny the "the vulture-vampires of venture capital" can be as intimidating as you describe them to be and even more so for startup founders. There are various reasons that lead me to turn my PhD into a startup; the first being that UCL encouraged me towards this direction. The other reason was that I really wanted the project that I would develop for my PhD, to be useful and valuable to the end-users also, not just to researchers and scholars. I did my MFA on Augmented Reality for Museums and so many times I read papers about a fantastic platform/device that I wanted to use so much, but I couldn't, because it was no longer in use (e.g. ARCHEOGUIDE). So for my PhD project, i didn't want that 5-years after I finish it, all that would be left of it, would be a thorough documentation of an exciting (I hope) platform that existed a while back but noone can use any longer. Which of course, until we figure out the commercial aspect of USEUM, remains a possibility! :-)

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