The American Art Collaborative Linked Open Data Consortium
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 Colby College Museum of Art 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 www.americanartcollaborative.org
Thanks to generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the AAC has converted over 230,000 museum object records to LOD.
USING THE AAC DATA
Linked data from the AAC partners is freely available on GitHub, mostly as RDF/Turtle:
- The American Art Collaborative Organization on Github contains all the repositories for the 14 participating AAC institutions, along with some of the group’s experiments and model speculations.
- The Colby College Museum of Art’s AAC repository contains linked data for the Colby College Museum of Art collection
VIEW THE 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.
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 Colby Museum’s Data, Contact Us
For more information about AAC’s next steps, contact [email protected]