Museums are increasingly adopting open data policies, both for easy internal reuse of data sets and as a way of building community engagement online. While the opening up of data is a welcome development, too often key audiences see too little of this information through too small a keyhole. As linked and open data formats and Application Programming Interfaces become more common for cultural repositories, providing a sense of the scope and shape of museum collections is moving from a problem of data access to one of presentation.
This project includes a set of tools for collections dissemination and visualizations appropriate for aggregate museum collection metadata, built with an eye to answering different questions than most museums currently address online.