On Exhibit by Yoana Kosturska

This project visualizes all Open Access artifacts that are on exhibit in any of the museums part of the Smithsonian Institution. The data and images are from the Smithsonian API, and include only the items with CC0 license. As of November 3rd, 2021, this search yields over 3300 results, spanning 3000BCE - 2010s. I wanted to focus on the items that are exhibited, digitalized and part of the open access API, as this gives an interesting perspective on the restrictions museums face in making their collections more accessible to the public. In a way, I also wanted to create an online tour of the available artifacts in each museum. Users can choose a museum to explore and see everything available in that museum (based on the data in the API) chronologically. This not only allows users to see the subset of artifacts that are displayed in the physical space of the museums, but also get to explore virtually a subset of these same artifacts, effectively creating an online tour of the museum - something ever more important in the times of COVID where a lot of constraints exist on public gatherings.