I originally posted this on the Science Museum developers blog.
I’m very excited about sharing this with you – we’ve just released 218,822 records about objects from the collections of the Science Museum, the National Media Museum and the National Railway Museum.
The collections include objects relating to aeronautics, agriculture, astronomy, cinematography, medicine, materials, space, television, time measurement, transport and more. They range in size from contact lenses to Concorde 002.
We’ve released the files as a lightweight experiment – we’d like to understand whether, and if so, how, people would use our data. We’d also like to explore the benefits for the museum and for programmers using our data – your feedback will inform decisions about future investment in more structured data as well as helping shape our understanding of the requirements of those users. The files are in CSV format – because it’s a really simple format, viewable in a text editor, we hope that it will be usable by most people.
We’ve published three data sets:
- 218,822 object records
- 40,596 media records
- 173 event records
The files are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) licence. Please get in touch if you’ve got ideas that require a commercial licence.
The files are available at
Documentation for collections data from Science Museum, National Media Museum, National Railway Museum (NMSI) released as CSV. This page includes information about the fields available and the collections included.
The documentation page includes contact addresses, or you can leave a comment below.