Announcing Curationist Museum Services and Launch Event

About Curationist Museum Services

Curationist Museum Services is Curationist Foundation's comprehensive support program designed to help museums, particularly small, grassroots-level institutions, share their collections with the world. We provide technical assistance, metadata standardization, and visibility via our platform to ensure cultural collections are as widely accessible online as possible.

What We Offer

• Licensing Support: Guidance on selecting and implementing Creative Commons licenses.
• Metadata Assistance: Optimization or development of schemas for better searchability.
• Platform Integration: Technical help to share collections on Curationist.org, WikiCommons, Europeana, and more.
• Funding Guidance: Support in securing resources for digitization projects.
• Networking: Connection to a global community of institutions and experts.

Call for Pilot Partners

We are looking for museum partners who want to make their digital collections open and free to access on the web using Creative Commons licenses.
In this new pilot program, organizations with digital collections will receive support to:

• Understand different types of Creative Commons open licenses and determine which is right for your collections and institution
• Work with your existing schema or develop a new one to share your collection metadata online
• Share digitized collections on your institution’s website, the Curationist platform, as well as other open aggregators like WikiCommons, Europeana, etc.
• Find funding to support this and future work
• Expand your network with other institutions and partners within the Curationist community.

"Curationist is dedicated to supporting open access for cultural heritage online, whilst continuously diversifying the scale and representation of institutions that appear on the platform. Through this open call, we hope to reach smaller museums within the US and globally, helping them to achieve a place alongside some of the most internationally recognized institutions. Further to this, the work our academics do to reinvigorate and activate the collections’ metadata demonstrates the significance of our partners’ missions to future audiences, shareholders, board members and supporters." -- Christian Dawson, Executive Director of Curationist

Email curationist@curationist.org to join us in shaping the future of accessible, open cultural heritage!

Curationist Museum Services Launch Event & Panel

As part of the Curationist Museum Services launch in New York City in February 2025, we are hosting a panel to explore the evolving digital landscape and the critical need for small museums to participate fully in the global cultural conversation.
The panel, featuring experts from Creative Commons, Curationist.org, and representatives from large and small museums, will focus on:

• How digital visibility and cross-institutional collaboration can uplift underrepresented voices.
• Tools and strategies smaller institutions can use to enhance reach and connect with global audiences.
• Methods to protect digital assets and foster inclusivity in cultural heritage sharing.

Designed for museum professionals, cultural heritage advocates, and educators, this discussion will empower smaller museums to access resources traditionally reserved for larger institutions, creating a more inclusive and diverse cultural heritage landscape.

Empowering Museums in the Digital Age: Launch of Curationist Museum Services

January 30th, 2025 5-8pm ET Register for the live stream here.
If you are able to attend in person in New York City, please email curationst@curationst.org for details.
Panelists: Christian Dawson - Executive Director, Curationist Foundation Amanda Figueroa - Platform Director, Curationist Jennryn Wetzler- Curationist Foundation Board Member, Director of Learning & Training, Creative Commons Emmy Parker - Founder, Black Sonic Archive Michael Kemezis - Director of Digital Humanities, CTH Elena Goukassian - Senior Editor, Museums & Heritage, The Art Newpaper

About Us

Curationist.org is a free tool that makes millions of digital images of artworks and artifacts from around the world easy to access, connecting minds to the history, stories, and ideas that collections inspire. It enables users and communities to seek, find, and reimagine cultural heritage through a vast archive of open access images, radical work with metadata, and editorial features
The platform was built in response to significant limitations to many institutions in broadening public access to their collections through digitization, including lack of funding, limited staff resources, and limited capacity to implement digitization initiatives.
Curationist enables users to search across institutions, large and small, to find open access cultural heritage images and records.
Since its launch in 2022, Curationist has enabled global users to search more than 4.4 million images of works from the open access collections of museums and archives worldwide.
Curationist Foundation is dedicated to bridging cultural divides by providing open access to diverse narratives and empowering individuals and communities to engage with and contribute to shared knowledge. Since 2001, they have been on a journey to bring global culture and perspectives to audiences. From 2018-2022 they launched Curationist.org, expanding their reach to a global audience with a platform that democratizes access to arts, culture, and heritage.

Contact Information

For media Inquiries:
Pelham Communications Emma Gilhooly, Vice President emma@pelhamcommunications.com | Phone: +1 929 613 9790
Alison Andrea Lopez, Account Director alison@pelhamcommunications.com | Phone: +1 917 378 0172
Curationist Contact Curationist@Curationist.org

Christian Dawson, Executive Director Christian@curationist.org
Amanda Figueroa, Platform Director Amanda@curationist.org