About

Museum Collections

Smithsonian Museum Collections contain objects from the Smithsonian's permanent collection as well as images, audio, videos, blogs, and other born-digital content.

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Archives Collections

Archival collections contain more than 2.1 million descriptions of personal papers, manuscripts, photographs, oral histories, films, works of art, organizational records as well as images, audio, videos, blogs, and other born-digital content.

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Smithsonian Libraries Databases

Smithsonian Libraries collections are particularly strong in natural history, tropical biology, and Chesapeake Bay area ecology; Anthropology; American and African American history and culture; postal, horticulture and garden history; the history of science and technology; aerospace history, astronomy, and planetary sciences; African, American Asian, contemporary, and design and decorative art; conservation science, and museum studies.

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Research Databases and Centers

The Research Databases and Centers listed below contain catalog records of materials that may or may not be owned by the Smithsonian Institution.

- Art -

- Science -

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Other Smithsonian Institution Resources

• Browse Videos
• Browse Podcasts
• Browse Blog Posts

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Image Gallery

This Gallery contains a sampling of visual records that are part of the Collections Search Center.

• click to view the Gallery

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The Technology

The Collections Search Center leverages a Smithsonian-developed metadata index and web services middle-layer that provides the Institution with a unified view across its multiple collection repositories. The Smithsonian name for this index and services middle-layer is EDAN - "Enterprise Digital Asset Network". In developing EDAN, the Smithsonian reviewed a number of commercial and open-source products. The functional requirements included the support of faceted metadata searching, Boolean / simple search logic, synonym/stemming matching, proximity matching, customizable relevance ranking, and highlighting display capability. It also would need to support a wide range of documents and objects from libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) and be accessible via standard web services. In the end, the Smithsonian selected the open-source Apache Lucene/Solr indexing software for the project and built a set of complementary request and delivery services using Java. A common Index Metadata Model was developed to handle the large variety of data formats from SI's underlying collections systems. In developing the model, SI incorporated elements and best practices from established standards such as Dublin Core, MARC, and METS as well as elements reflected in the underlying COTS museum and library systems. Data mappings were performed and processes were put in place to provide regular record ingest and updates from more than 50 Institution data sources (systems and databases). This iterative process continues and the intent is for EDAN to index all major cataloged Smithsonian collections holdings. EDAN and the Collections Search Center are therefore dynamic and continually growing.

EDAN has offered the Smithsonian a flexible and scalable indexing, metadata and image delivery platform to support Smithsonian web and mobile application access to its fast growing online collections. The Collections Search Center, a web application that uses EDAN, has provided a strong, user-friendly search interface, enhanced through Java and CSS style sheets, for navigating these online collections. In doing so, it furthers the Institution's goal of making its collections available to a worldwide audience.

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