The Smithsonian National Timesink Webmuseum

September 7, 2018 1:13 PM

The Smithsonian Collections Search Center is an online catalog containing most of Smithsonian major collections from our museums, archives, libraries, and research units. There are 13.5 million catalog records relating to areas for Art & Design, History & Culture, and Science & Technology with over 3.1 million images, videos, audio files, podcasts, blog posts and electronic journals. This catalog is regularly updated as catalog records are being added and revised. Thanks, Jessamyn!
posted by not_on_display (3 comments total)

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has a "visible art storage and study center" called the Luce Foundation Center which is like library stacks for art. If you've ever wondered why museums have so many objects that are, uh, not_on_display (eponysterical) the Luce Center is a demonstration of what it means to try to display lots of things in a small amount of space. It's amazing, but also completely overwhelming, and also also (by necessity) incredibly sparse in terms of curatorial information about the works on display.

Why do I bring this up? Because one of the few bits of information on the card for every object on display is its acquisition number, which you can use to find the web page for the piece you're looking at. Titles and artist names are sometimes less helpful for searches, but the acquisition number gets you to the precise thing (or group of things, as the case may be). Their search engine can be really slow, but the acquisition number means you don't have to page through results or do a lot of drilling down. One and done.

Figuring this out completely changed the way I visit Smithsonian museums.
posted by fedward at 2:06 PM on September 7, 2018 [5 favorites]

One thing to note is that it's a collections database "cross search", so is searching/pulling from a lot of different Smithsonian databases (of varying levels of detail). They don't explicitly say this on the landing page, but if you want to drill down in an individual record, be sure to click on "view full record", if that is an option offered, and then also on the "record link" button, if that option is available, to go to the record in the originating database.
posted by gudrun at 5:12 PM on September 7, 2018

I'm so glad you found out about the acquisition/accession number, fedward! It really does help when you're doing research in museums.
posted by Mouse Army at 7:38 PM on September 7, 2018