The American Art Collaborative (AAC) is a consortium of fourteen U.S. institutions—thirteen museums and one archive—working together to create a critical mass of Linked Open Data (LOD) around the subject of the visual arts in America.
The National Museum of Wildlife Art has been working with the AAC since the consortium’s formal establishment in 2014. For a full list of participating institutions, educational briefings, presentations, and general project background, visit AmericanArtCollaborative.org.
Thanks to generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (awarded to SAAM on behalf of AAC) and a leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (awarded to AAC partner Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), the AAC has converted over 230,000 museum object records to LOD.
Browse Application Prototype
To design and develop a usable application for exploring the collected data, the project established a Browse Working Group, which developed a demonstration application, available at browse.americanartcollaborative.org.
The site allows objects and artists from across the 14 partner institutions to be explored through one interface. This application is a prototype, and is not meant to represent all the things that can be done with museum data in the future. Rather, it provides easy access to the available partner information and focuses on a few straightforward ways that data from the different institutions can be connected and explored.
The information contributed by the National Museum of Wildlife Art to the American Art Collaborative represents a selection of artwork from the museum’s collections. These pieces were chosen to showcase the dynamic and evolving cultural practices of the many diverse peoples and perspectives that have shaped the American West.
Using the AAC Data
The URI construction for SPARQL queries is data.americanartcollaborative.org/sparql. We invite developers to make use of this data in their applications and share their results with us.
https://americanart.si.edu/about/lod/aac
Connect to our artwork data using this URI schema: data.americanartcollaborative.org/nmwa/object/[object_number]
Example: http://data.americanartcollaborative.org/page/nmwa/object/5445
Connect to the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s artist data using this URI schema: data.americanartcollaborative.org/page/nmwa/constituent/[lastname_firstname]
Example: http://data.americanartcollaborative.org/page/nmwa/constituent/carlson_ken
Metadata and LOD from the AAC partners is freely available on GitHub:
github.com/american-art – A complete set of data from the 14 participating institutions
github.com/american-art/NMWA – Data from the National Museum of Wildlife Art
AAC Next Steps
As a next step, the AAC is seeking additional funding to expand the application of LOD within the museum and archival communities. It is our hope that opportunities to link or interconnect data will increase as more museums produce LOD and that AAC will continue to take a leading role in advancing collaboration across museums.
Contact Us
For questions or feedback on National Museum of Wildlife Art Data, contact ewinters@wildlifeart.org
For more information about AAC’s next steps, contact EleanorFink@earthlink.net
