1. Have you ever wondered what happens when a museum releases 375,000 images into the wild with no restrictions? Loic Tallon, Chief Digital Officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gives us a 6 month status update on the Met’s Open Access initiative.

Celebrating Six Months of Open Access, plus The Met on Google BigQuery

Loic Tallon discusses the impact of the Open Access initiative on the public’s engagement with The Met collection and announces the addition of the Museum’s public data set to Google’s BigQuery platform.

2. On a related note, the Smithsonian Magazine reports that open data at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan has allowed the museum to bring its large collection of Chinese Art virtually back to mainland China (and to the rest of the world.)

This Taiwanese Museum Just Digitized Its Massive Collection of Chinese Art

In 1948, amidst the chaos of China’s civil war, Nationalist forces evacuated thousands of priceless artifacts from Beijing to Taiwan. The preemptive decision proved timely: By the following year, Mao Zedong’s Communist Party had seized power. In lieu of this regime change, the evacuated collection never returned to its home country.

3. Researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, along with eight other museums and research institutions, have developed a publicly available database that makes it easier to share and reuse genetic data for environmental and ecological analyses. It’s pretty cool to see museum data made available for this important research!

Scientists link biodiversity genomics with museum wisdom through new public database: Genomic observatories metadatabase will aid scientists aiming to study the impact of global challenges across life on earth

A new publicly available database will catalog metadata associated with biologic samples, making it easier for researchers to share and reuse genetic data for environmental and ecological analyses. It links publicly available genetic data to records of where and when samples were collected. Such information is critical for comparing biodiversity in different locations worldwide, across time.

4. Southern California arts venues are gearing up the second edition of the regional collaborative effort called Pacific Standard Time. This year the impressive undertaking focuses on Latin American and Latino art called LA/LA. Jim Cuno, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, hopes the work that went into LA/LA has a lasting impact: “We don’t want to overstate our claims, but we think this will change art history by including in the canon much more Latin American art than what is usually considered.”

Scholarship drives the next edition of Pacific Standard Time

The Art Newspaper is the journal of record for the visual arts world, covering international news and events. Based in London and New York, the English-language publication is part of a network of titles founded by Umberto Allemandi with editions in Italian, French, Russian, Chinese and Greek.

5. We’re all familiar with how social media allows us to provide instant feedback – good and bad—about experiences in our museums. This visitor had a creative social media response when she was asked to cover up while breastfeeding at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I should note that the museum apologized and the director of the museum responded on Twitter that the museum’s policy clearly says breastfeeding mothers should “not be disturbed.” The apology was accepted.

Nursing Mom Makes The Breast Of It After Museum Tells Her To Cover Up

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has apologized to a breastfeeding visitor who says she was told to cover up. The woman, who posts on Twitter as @vaguechera, says she had “flashed a nanosecond of nipple” in the museum’s courtyard when she was told to conceal her breasts.

Do you have a great museum story to share?