scrapi, a metropolitan museum collections api

scrAPI.org is an api that grabs object information from the metropolitan museum's collections website.

Get a random object (/random)

Try curl scrapi.org/random in a terminal, or just click on /random

$ curl 'scrapi.org/random'
{
  "CRDID": 12351,
  "accessionNumber": "65.211.3",
  ...
}

Object information (/object/:id)

Try curl scrapi.org/object/123 in a terminal, or just click on object/1234

$ curl 'scrapi.org/object/123'
{
  "CRDID": 123,
  "accessionNumber": "64.291.2",
  ...
}

Searching for object ids (/search/:terms)

You can now search for terms, and get back an array of hrefs to object pages

$ curl 'scrapi.org/search/mirror'
{
  "collection": {
    "items": [
      {
          "href": "http://scrapi.org/object/156225"
      },
      {
          "href": "http://scrapi.org/object/207785"
      },
      ...
      ]
    }

}

additional Params in search:

&page=X - for additional pages

&gallerynos=X for only objects in that gallery

Filtering with the fields parameter

If you want to filter any response, use the fields parameter, like so:

$ curl 'scrapi.org/object/123?fields=title,whoList/who/name'
{
  "whoList": {
    "who": {
      "name": "Richard Wittingham"
    }
  },
  "title": "Andiron"
}

The syntax to filter out fields is loosely based on XPath:

• a,b,c comma-separated list will select multiple fields
• a/b/c path will select a field from its parent
• a(b,c) sub-selection will select many fields from a parent
• a/*/c the star * wildcard will select all items in a field

I like the following fields for basic object information: fields=title,primaryArtistNameOnly,primaryImageUrl,medium,whatList/what/name,whenList/when/name,whereList/where/name,whoList/who/name

Guidelines

The code is CC0, but if you do anything interesting with the data, it would be nice to give attribution to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you do anything interesting with the code, it would be nice to give attribution and contribute back any modifications or improvements.

Please submit all questions, bugs and feature requests to the issue page.

Dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz.

Installation and Deployment

The API requires node.js, uses redis for caching, and is built on the koa web framework. Install the required libraries with npm install. You can start the server and redis together with foreman start if you have foreman (recommended), or if you have some other way of having redis run, just do npm start.

To make deployments easy, we use deliver. Install deliver, edit .deliver/config, and run deliver to push the latest changes to a remote server. This has been tested on OSX 10.9 and Ubuntu 14.04.