Mansion maniac is an online toy created by the New York Public Library, which through the use of an icon similar to Pac-Man will allow users to explore the different floors of the building for one of the most extravagant residences of the early years of the XNUMXth century.
But this game is really the marketing teaser for the redistribution of an intellectual property with the availability of more than 180.000 photographs, postcards, maps and other articles from the special collections of this library so that any user can download them in high resolution.
Digitization has been very rampant since the past decade where libraries, museums and other institutions have scanned millions of articles and then take them online. But the initiative, which has been online since Wednesday, goes beyond these practices in order to set the starting point for something that will be done so that anyone can access great cultural content.
There are already numerous institutions that have put the label "Free or open content". While the new initiative by this library is one of the largest available from Rijksmuseum In Amsterdam, it is also notable for more than just size.
The big difference is that all content will be available for free for an immediate download, apart from the programming interfaces, known as APIs, which will allow developers to use them more easily. Users will be able to access the information from the internal database, which will allow them to know which articles are free.
One of the options will be to use this huge database to view photos as in Street View where it is possible to know what Fifth Avenue was like before, in order to compare it with the current location from the Google app.
Una very interesting proposal that you can access it from this link.