It seems that almost every discipline imaginable is undergoing a digital transformation. That includes the art, science, and culture world of museums, many of which are offering open data access to collections. In this article, we highlight 10 popular APIs from our Museums category.
It seems that almost every discipline imaginable is undergoing a digital transformation these days. That includes the art, science, and culture world of museums. More and more museums are opening access to digital files of the artifacts in their collections. Offering this kind of open data access encourages innovation for new visitor experiences, simplifies collaborations, offers machine-readability for digital art projects, provides an online outlet to showcase collections for remote enjoyment or student learning, provides better catalog record-keeping, and many other reasons. Developers wishing to create or enhance applications with museum collection images, metadata, or other museum related data need the correct APIs to interact with. A Museums API is an Application Programming Interface that enables developers to programmatically access data, including media from museums, or about museums. The best place to discover museum APIs is in the Museums category of the ProgrammableWeb API directory. In this article, we highlight 10 popular APIs from that category, based on website visits. New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art contains over 5000 years of art from around the world in its collection. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Met Collection APITrack this API is a Public API released in 2018 that provides select datasets of information on more than 400,000 artworks for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use. The API provides access to all of the Met’s Open Access data and to corresponding high resolution images. Public domain images of The Met collection are available under Creative Commons Zero. Screenshot: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Artsy.net is a marketplace learning about, and for buying, works of art.
