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 Gilcrease Museum is proud to have participated in AAC's Linked Open Data Consortium. For a full list of participating institutions, educational briefings, presentations, and general project background, visit AmericanArtCollaborative.org.

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. 

Using the AAC Data

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.
 

Connect to Gilcrease's artist data using this URI schema: data.americanartcollaborative.org/GM/constituent/lastname_firstname

Example: http://data.americanartcollaborative.org/page/GM/constituent/moran_thomas
 

Connect to our collection item data using this URI schema: data.americanartcollaborative.org/GM/object/id[ID]

Example: http://data.americanartcollaborative.org/page/GM/object/1982
 

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/GM -Data from the Gilcrease Museum
 

Contact Gilcrease Museum for questions about our data. 

Licensing and Usage Guidelines for Gilcrease Data

If you wish to use the underlying content for anything other than personal or non-commercial usage, please contact Rights and Reproductions staff. 

The availability of a link to a digital resource does not imply or convey permission to download, distribute, or use that file in any way that would be incompatible with the Terms of Use of the Gilcrease Museum.

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 that opportunities to link or interconnect data will increase and that AAC will continue to take a leading role in advancing collaboration across museums.

Contact Eleanor Fink for questions about the AAC's next steps.