How to Scrape Museum Collections: Metropolitan and Smithsonian APIs

How to Scrape Museum Collections: Metropolitan and Smithsonian APIs The world's greatest museums have digitized millions of artworks and artifacts, many accessible through free public APIs. Let's build a Python pipeline to collect, analyze, and visualize museum collection data. Available Museum APIs Metropolitan Museum of Art — 470K+ objects, fully open, no key needed Smithsonian Institution — 15M+ records across 19 museums Rijksmuseum — Dutch masters and more Harvard Art Museums — 250K+ objects Setting Up pip install requests pandas matplotlib tqdm The Met Collection API The Met's API is completely open — no key required: import requests import time from tqdm import tqdm MET_BASE = " https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/public/collection/v1 " def get_met_departments (): resp = requests . get ( f " { MET_BASE } /departments " ) return resp . json ()[ " departments " ] def search_met ( query , department_id = None ): params = { " q " : query } if department_id : params [ " departmentId "