A New API for WCMA

Activating the Collection for faculty, students, artists and dreamers

First, some background on WCMA Digital: we’re a Mellon-funded initiative to inspire new use of the collection. Two essential questions power our work: How can we make WCMA’s collection more useful for students, faculty and our community? and How can those uses add context to the collection itself?

Opening the collection opened a floodgate of interest, opportunities…and data. Stats classes want to use the collection data to study clustering algorithms! Great! Computer Science students are looking at keyword tagging with machine learning! Brilliant! That kind of use shows us what data is most useful. It also adds new context and knowledge to the collection. There’s no better way to improve your data than to have others use it.

We learned we needed a flexible datastore. We knew the core data we wanted to include, but we also knew we’d want to add new kinds of data next year (even next semester). It had to be easy to get data in, and easy to get data out. (Alas, museum collection management systems aren’t built for such.) We needed a system that would ingest data from many sources (and allow us to monitor and control the process). Give it a name and value, relate it to an object ID, and boom — it’s part of the data. That’s the idea.

Special thanks go to the WCMA Digital team as well. Collection Developer Jim Allison wrangled the TMS tables to get some beautiful JSON files into the datastore (article forthcoming), Associate Registrar Rachel Tassone guided the flow of collection data, and Liz Gallerani and Sonnet Coggins connected us to eager collaborators. The Mellon Foundation makes it all possible.

What’s next? We’re introducing the API to students and faculty, new friends at NEW INC., and you. We’re eager to see how it’s used in fall classes, projects and collaborations — and we’ll learn from seeing how it’s used. Our hope is not just that people will do computery things with our art collection, but also that people will do artful things with their computer applications. We’re building a web-based tool (atop our new API) that will help students and faculty visualize the collection from a range of perspectives. And we’re working on our third data-driven collection exhibition for 2019. Stay tuned!

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