The Yellow Milkmaid Syndrome. "The Milkmaid’, one of Johannes Vermeer's most famous pieces, depicts a scene of a woman quietly pouring milk into a bowl. During a survey the Rijksmuseum discovered that there were over 10,000 copies of the image on the internet—mostly poor, yellowish reproductions. As a result of all of these low-quality copies on the web, according to the Rijksmuseum, “people simply didn’t believe the postcards in our museum shop were showing the original painting. This was the trigger for us to put high-resolution images of the original work with open metadata on the web ourselves. Opening up our data is our best defence against the ‘yellow Milkmaid’." https://pro.europeana.eu/post/the-problem-of-the-yellow-milkmaid #art #collections #museum #openmuseum