Wherever you are in the world, you now have access not only to a wealth of information about our collection but also in many languages! The Heritage Fund has published data on over 3,000 works of art from its collection on Wikidata, a database hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. From now on, anyone can quickly find these works via Google or any other search engine.

Information searches usually start with Google or another online research engine. Wikipedia articles – as well as the data relating to works published on Wikidata and photos uploaded onto Wikimedia Commons – usually appear at the top of the list. It is for this reason that the King Baudouin Foundation decided to work together with these platforms, in order to make our heritage better known among the general public and to make the works digitally accessible.

This undertaking will also enable anyone surfing the Internet to consult our collection, wherever he or she is in the world. Wikidata enables the information about a work to be linked to other relevant pieces of information. Works are thus placed in their artistic context and this in turn yields other avenues to explore so as to better understand the reasons for their existence. In this way we hope to raise awareness among the general public about the importance of our heritage and the need to preserve it!

Thanks to this collaboration, data on over 3,000 of the King Baudouin Foundation’s works of art are currently available on Wikidata. This information has been further enriched by the museums and other institutions to which the works have been entrusted and it has also been linked to information already available on Wikidata, as well as to other databases and websites. The resulting network of information is enormous!