To mark the Open Knowledge Festival week (17.–22.9.2012), the Finnish National Gallery’s Central Art Archives is issuing a data set comprising its unique collection of glass negatives by prominent early photographer Daniel Nyblin (1856–1923), plus descriptive information.
The Central Art Archives is a diversified information centre which collects and stores material on the visual arts, focusing on Finland. This will be the first time it makes any of its database content publicly available.
Daniel Nyblin was born in Norway but in 1875 moved to Finland, where he became one of the country’s leading and most productive photographers around the turn of the 19th century. As well as photographing people and scenery, he recorded on glass negatives what were often newly completed or first-exhibited Finnish art works. It is specifically these items, dating from 1879 to 1904, that form the Archives' Nyblin collection.
For each work, a new digital negative was produced by photographing Nyblin’s original glass; in each case, a positive was then produced of the whole image. The data set will be made accessible on September, 17th, 2012.
Artists’ works still covered by copyright cannot be included in an open-access data set. The data set now made available will be published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA3.0) license.