Search the collectionSearch all 17 million public-domain records the Smithsonian has released: objects, artworks, specimens, photographs and archives from every museum, the National Zoo and the Institution's libraries. Filter by museum, topic, place, culture, object type, media type and the years it was made. Each record comes back with its title, museum, subjects, descriptive text, permanent link and any CC0 images attached to it.
Search a categorySearch within one of the Smithsonian's three Open Access categories: Art & Design, History & Culture, or Science & Technology, instead of across everything. The same filters apply; the category is the Smithsonian's own grouping of its collections, so this is the way to keep a search about 'Mercury' on planets rather than on thermometers.
Get a recordGet one record in full by its id: title, museum, subjects, places, cultures, makers, every line of descriptive text the owning museum published, its permanent link, and every CC0 image or scan attached to it. Use the id or the EDAN url a search result carries.
Find imagesFind Smithsonian records that really do carry a public-domain image (or 3D model, recording or scan), and return the media itself: the picture URL ready to embed, a thumbnail, the full-resolution download and the pixel dimensions of each. Unlike a plain search with a media filter, every result here has a file: records are read and checked rather than trusted to their index, which over-reports.
Download a media fileDownload one of a record's public-domain files: an image, a scan, a recording, as a file a later step can attach to an email, post to a chat or put in storage. Choose thumbnail, screen size or full resolution. Use this wherever a link will not do and the file itself has to travel with the message.
Get a random recordPick one Smithsonian record at random from everything the filters match: an object of the day for a newsletter, a channel post, or a slide. Narrow it to a museum or a topic to keep the pick on theme, and ask for one with a picture when the post needs one.
Get records updated sinceFind the Smithsonian records that have changed since a given date and time: the check to run on a schedule to keep a copy in step, or to watch one museum for new acquisitions. Pass the time the previous run reported and this returns only what has changed since.
List search termsLook up the exact wording the Smithsonian indexes by. Topics, places and cultures are matched as exact phrases: the collection knows 'Jazz (Music)', not 'jazz', so this is how to find the phrase before filtering a search on it. Also lists the unit codes, the decades records are dated to and the kinds of media they carry.
List museums and archivesList every Smithsonian museum, archive and research unit that has released Open Access records, with the unit code a search filters by and how much of each is public domain. This is how to find out whether a museum is worth filtering to: the National Museum of Natural History's botany department alone is 4.5 million records, and some units have a few hundred.
Get Open Access statisticsHow much of the Smithsonian is open: how many records the Institution holds, how many of those are public domain, how many carry a public-domain image or scan, and how many media files that comes to. The counts are recomputed monthly and the result says which month it is reporting.
