This week the New York Times dropped the walls around its gardens of knowledge, making current materials and most of those in its archives open and free to Internet visitors. An example of what this means is that the excellent interactive, narrated A Guide to “The Age of Rembrandt” that went online today will stay open. Until the new policy went into effect this week, marvelous knowledge assets like this Guide would be online for a few days — and then disappear into a paid archive.
Although the payment was a nuisance for scholars, the pay wall was much more hurtful in a different way. Because the wall was there, it was not possible for websites to link to the Guide. Students, teachers, painters — those who wanted to include the Guide as part of a report, lesson or study could not. Now they can.
Kudos to the Times! Wonderful!
Added October 15, 2007: The Metropolitan Museum of Art podcast page offers a narration of the exhibit by Walter Liedtke, Curator of European Paintings at the museum.
Technorati Tags: art, oer, rembrandt
