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 Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields has been a member of the AAC since the consortium’s 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 and a leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the AAC has converted over 230,000 museum object records into linked open data, including information about 11,000+ artworks and 2,000+ artists from the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields collection.
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.
Metadata and LOD from the AAC partners is freely available on GitHub:
BROWSE APPLICATION PROTOTYPE
To design and develop a usable application for exploring the collected data, the project established a Browse Working Group, involving six of the 14 institutions and led by Design for Context, who 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.
LICENSING AND USAGE GUIDELINES FOR THE IMA AT NEWFIELDS DATA
The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields licenses the use of our collections’ metadata under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) waiver, which allows for re-use of the metadata without legal restrictions. Please be aware that the content to which the metadata links may not be covered by the CC0 waiver. While Newfields provides hyperlinks as a means of referencing underlying image or multimedia content associated with the metadata, this content itself is not part of the metadata being released and is not necessarily covered by the CC0 waiver.
If you wish to use the underlying image or multimedia content for anything other than personal or scholarly, noncommercial uses, or that is otherwise a fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws, please contact the Legal Affairs & Intellectual Property department. The availability of a link to an image or multimedia file does not imply or convey permission to download, distribute, or use that digital resource in any way that would be incompatible with Newfields' reproduction guidelines (see Licensing Resources for more details).
Additional guidelines:
- Give proper attribution by including the statement “Data Source: Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields” and by providing the URI for the object being referenced.
- Do not mislead others or misrepresent the metadata or its sources.
- Understand that data is used at your own risk.
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. As more museums produce LOD, we hope they will contact us, dialogue will ensue, and opportunities will increase to link or interconnect data and further demonstrate the value of LOD.
CONTACT US
For questions or feedback on the IMA's data, please contact the Newfields Lab.
For more information about AAC’s next steps, contact eleanorfink@earthlink.net.
