Open Access at Mia

The mission of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts includes making the outstanding works of art in its collections accessible to a global audience – both the objects and what we know about them. Wherever possible, this information will be shared free of charge and with few or no restrictions on its use.

What we share

Metadata

Our metadata is available as JSON on Github.

Download it if you're interested in exploring data about what art is held in the museum's collection.

Images

Images of works of art identified as in the Public Domain (CC PDM) have been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights. Mia’s collection contains over 50,000 works in the Public Domain! You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the works, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Mia encourages engagement with the contents of our websites in accordance with our Copyright Policy. Depending on copyright status in the works of art depicted, users may use, download, and share our website images either freely with no restrictions (works in the public domain), or with some restrictions (copyrighted works or works with
other legal restrictions).

Find the download button (file_download) on an artwork page. Public Domain artworks can be downloaded in high resolution, while other works protected by copyright, or where copyright status is not yet known are available at a smaller size.

A number of our images are available on Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons.

For more information on Copyright and Image Access and Use please see our Copyright and Image Access Page

3D models

We host a number of public 3D models on Sketchfab. As they're uploaded, we also display 3D models on our collections site - find the "show 3D model" button.

Source code

Much of the code that powers this website and other museum projects are developed 'open source as we go', to share what we're doing with colleagues at other museums and anybody else that's interested. Some of it is a mess, but dive in at our GitHub page if you're brave.

Here's the source code for this page.

TODO

We're constantly working to make improvements to our technical systems. Here are a few things we would like to accomplish: