Photo by Alexander Kagan on Unsplash

The Louvre in Paris just announced that 482,000 digitized artworks are available online for free. While many institutions have been digitizing their collections for years, this initiative was particularly labour intensive due to the sheer volume of their collection. Each digitized artwork is accompanied with important metadata including “title, artist, inventory number, dimensions, materials and techniques, date and place of production, object history, current location and bibliography,” according to NPR. While devastating on many levels, one of the co-benefits of the pandemic was that it encouraged cultural institutions to find new ways to make their collections and programs more publicly accessible and sustainable. The Louvre’s famous artworks are not always accessible to the public as a result of prohibitive travel and entrance fees. However, this initiative will open art to more people from across the world.