Europeana Art Scraper

Scrape Europeana — the European Union's cultural heritage aggregator, covering tens of millions of paintings, photographs, drawings, manuscripts, maps, sound recordings and 3D objects contributed by 4,000+ museums, libraries and archives. Run free-text searches, narrow to a media type, or browse everything a single country's institutions have digitised, and get titles, creators, descriptions, subjects, holding institution, rights statement, preview image, and geo-coordinates. HTTP-only via the public api.europeana.eu search API. No auth, no proxy.

What this actor does

• Three modes: search, byMediaType, byCountry
• Filters: media category (IMAGE / SOUND / VIDEO / TEXT / 3D), providing country across 30 European countries, and record language
• Media-first results: by default only items with a viewable image or media preview are returned
• Rights-aware: every record carries the rights statement so you know what you may reuse
• Empty fields are omitted

Output per cultural item

• europeanaId — Europeana item identifier
• title — item title, first available language
• creators — artists / authors / photographers, deduplicated
• description — item description, first available language
• type — Europeana media category (IMAGE, TEXT, SOUND, VIDEO, 3D)
• subjects — subject keywords (capped at 10)
• institution — holding institution (first data provider)
• dataProviders — every contributing institution for the item
• europeanaCollection — Europeana collection the item belongs to
• country, countries — providing country
• languages — record languages
• rights — rights / licence statement URL
• imageUrl — preview image or media file
• shownAt — item page on the holding institution's own site
• sourceUrl — item page on europeana.eu
• completenessScore — Europeana's 0–10 metadata completeness rating
• dateCreated — record creation timestamp
• latitude, longitude — place coordinates, when the item is geo-located
• recordType: "cultural_item", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	search	search / byMediaType / byCountry
searchQuery	string	impressionism painting	Free-text query
mediaType	string	–	painting / photograph / drawing / manuscript / sculpture / map / print (mode=byMediaType)
recordType_filter	string	IMAGE	Europeana media category: IMAGE / SOUND / VIDEO / TEXT / 3D
country	string	–	Providing country, e.g. Netherlands, France (mode=byCountry)
language	string	–	2-letter ISO record language, e.g. en, fr, de
hasMedia	bool	true	Only return items with an image or media preview
maxItems	int	50	Hard cap (1–500)

Example: impressionist paintings

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "impressionism painting",
  "recordType_filter": "IMAGE",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Example: historical manuscripts

{
  "mode": "byMediaType",
  "mediaType": "manuscript",
  "recordType_filter": "TEXT",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Example: everything digitised by Dutch institutions

{
  "mode": "byCountry",
  "country": "Netherlands",
  "recordType_filter": "IMAGE",
  "maxItems": 500
}

Example: French-language sound recordings

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "folk music",
  "recordType_filter": "SOUND",
  "language": "fr"
}

Use cases

• Museums & galleries — discover related holdings across European institutions for an exhibition
• Digital humanities — build subject- or region-scoped corpora of digitised heritage material
• Publishing & media — source openly licensed historical imagery with the rights statement attached
• Edtech — assemble illustrated teaching collections by period, place, or medium
• Machine learning — gather labelled art and manuscript imagery with provenance metadata
• Cultural mapping — plot geo-located heritage items by country and institution

FAQ

What is Europeana? The EU's cultural heritage platform, aggregating digitised collections from thousands of European museums, galleries, libraries, and archives into one searchable index. See europeana.eu.

Is this affiliated with Europeana? No. This is a third-party actor built on their public search API.

Do I need an API key? No. The actor uses Europeana's open public search access, so you can run it with no registration.

Can I reuse the images commercially? Check rights on each record before reusing anything. Europeana aggregates everything from public domain marks to in-copyright items that are view-only — the licence varies item by item, not collection by collection.

What does completenessScore mean? Europeana's own 0–10 rating of how rich an item's metadata is. Higher-scoring records typically have creator, date, subject and description filled in; low scores often have little more than a title.

What's the difference between recordType_filter and mediaType? recordType_filter is Europeana's structural media category (image, sound, video, text, 3D). mediaType is a descriptive term like painting or manuscript used to steer the search. They're complementary — a manuscript is usually TEXT, a painting usually IMAGE.

What's the difference between sourceUrl and shownAt? sourceUrl is the item's page on europeana.eu. shownAt is the same item on the holding institution's own website, which often has higher-resolution files and fuller provenance.

Why are titles and descriptions sometimes not in English? Records are supplied in the institution's own language. The actor returns the first available language rather than dropping the field; use language to restrict results.

Why do subjects stop at 10? Well-catalogued items can carry dozens of subject headings across several languages. The first 10 keep records readable; the full set is on the linked item page.

How fresh is the data? Live at query time. Europeana itself re-harvests from contributing institutions on their own schedules, so newly digitised items can take weeks to appear.