Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper - Open Access Art

Scrape the Cleveland Museum of Art open-access collection in bulk. Extract title, creators, date, culture, department, type, technique, measurements, licence status and image URL to CSV/JSON. No API key.

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What does the Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper do?

This Actor turns any Cleveland Museum of Art search into a structured dataset. You give it CC0 only or by search term, it walks the result pages one after another, and it writes one clean row per artwork into your dataset — ready to export as JSON, CSV or Excel, or to pull straight from the Apify API.

The museum's open-access API is keyless and returns the full record for every object, including an explicit licence status. That last field matters more than anything else here: it tells you outright which images are CC0 and therefore safe to reuse commercially. Pagination is followed automatically until it runs out of results, hits your page limit or hits your Max items cap, whichever comes first. Every row is de-duplicated across the whole run, so you are never billed twice for the same artwork.

There is no API key, no login and no browser involved. That keeps runs fast and cheap, and it means you can schedule the Actor without worrying about credentials expiring.

Who is it for?

• AI and ML teams needing openly licensed images with clear rights status.
• Publishers and educators sourcing artwork they can legally reproduce.
• Digital humanities researchers studying a collection quantitatively.
• Developers building cultural discovery or search tools.
• Designers looking for reusable high-resolution reference imagery.

Use cases

• Export every CC0 artwork with its image URL for commercial reuse.
• Build a labelled image dataset with culture, technique and date.
• Analyse a department's holdings by period and medium.
• Search the collection by keyword and export the matches.
• Cross-reference the collection against another museum's open data.

Why use this Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper?

• 🔑 Keyless — no account, no API token, no cookies to paste.
• 📦 17 fields per artwork — everything the result page exposes, already typed.
• 📄 Real pagination — it walks page after page instead of returning the first screen.
• 🎯 Precise caps — Max items stops the run exactly where you want it, so the bill is predictable.
• 📊 Export anywhere — JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, plus the Apify API and integrations.
• 💸 Pay per result — you pay for rows you actually receive, with no platform fees to calculate.

What data can you extract?

Every run produces one row per artwork, with these fields:

Field	Type	Description
artworkId	string	Museum object ID
accessionNumber	string	Accession number
title	string	Artwork title
artworkUrl	string	Public page for the artwork
creators	string	Creators, separated by a pipe
creationDate	string	Creation date as published
culture	string	Culture attribution, separated by a pipe
department	string	Museum department
type	string	Object type, e.g. Painting
technique	string	Technique or materials
measurements	string	Measurements as published
creditLine	string	Credit line for attribution
licenceStatus	string	Open-access licence status, e.g. CC0
imageUrl	string	Web-resolution image URL
query	string	Search term this row came from
page	number	Result page the artwork appeared on
scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of extraction

Output example

{
  "accessionNumber": "1915.534",
  "artworkId": "94979",
  "artworkUrl": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1915.534",
  "creationDate": "c. 1765",
  "creators": "John Singleton Copley (American, born The Thirteen Colonies, 1738\u20131815)",
  "creditLine": "Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust",
  "culture": "America",
  "department": "American Painting and Sculpture",
  "imageUrl": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1915.534/1915.534_web.jpg",
  "licenceStatus": "CC0",
  "measurements": "Framed: 90.5 x 78 x 6.5 cm (35 5/8 x 30 11/16 x 2 9/16 in.); Unframed: 76.2 x 64.8 cm (30 x 25 1/2 in.)",
  "page": 1,
  "query": "whole collection",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-15T07:53:06.876Z",
  "technique": "oil on canvas",
  "title": "Nathaniel Hurd",
  "type": "Painting"
}

How to use

Option A — CC0 only

{
  "ccZeroOnly": true,
  "imagesOnly": true,
  "maxItems": 1000,
  "maxPagesPerSearch": 10,
  "searchTerms": []
}

1. Open the Actor and fill in the CC0 only field.
2. Set Max pages per search and Max items to bound the run.
3. Click Start, then export from the Output tab.

Option B — by search term

{
  "imagesOnly": true,
  "maxItems": 500,
  "maxPagesPerSearch": 10,
  "searchTerms": [
    "japanese print"
  ]
}

Paste one or more Cleveland Museum of Art URLs into Start URLs and the Actor paginates each of them independently.

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
searchTerms	array	[]	Search the collection.
imagesOnly	boolean	true	Skip records that have no digitised photograph.
ccZeroOnly	boolean	false	Keep only artworks released under CC0.
maxPagesPerSearch	integer	4	How many result pages to walk for each search.
maxItems	integer	150	Stop after this many artworks.
maxConcurrency	integer	2	Parallel requests.
proxyConfiguration	object	{"useApifyProxy": true}	Proxy used to fetch pages.

Tips for best results

• Leave the search term empty to walk the collection — the museum publishes nearly 69,000 objects.
• licenceStatus of CC0 means the image is free to reuse, including commercially.
• Turn on images-only to skip records that have no digitised photograph.
• creators and culture are pipe-separated so they survive a CSV round trip.
• The API pages with a skip offset, so deep exports are straightforward.
• technique is often more precise than type when you need a specific medium.
• Schedule occasional runs; the collection changes slowly.
• Keep creditLine with any image you republish.
• Keep Max concurrency low — the API is free and lightly resourced.
• Pair with the Art Institute of Chicago scraper for a second open collection.

Integrations

Send results straight into the tools you already use: Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make, Airtable or any Webhook. You can also schedule the Actor to run hourly, daily or weekly and have each run append to the same dataset, which is how you build a price or availability history rather than a one-off snapshot.

API usage

Run the Actor and collect results from any language. Replace <YOUR_TOKEN> with your Apify API token.

cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/logiover~cleveland-art-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"ccZeroOnly": true, "imagesOnly": true, "maxItems": 1000, "maxPagesPerSearch": 10, "searchTerms": []}'

Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_TOKEN>' });
const run = await client.actor('logiover/cleveland-art-scraper').call({"ccZeroOnly": true, "imagesOnly": true, "maxItems": 1000, "maxPagesPerSearch": 10, "searchTerms": []});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient('<YOUR_TOKEN>')
run = client.actor('logiover/cleveland-art-scraper').call(run_input={"ccZeroOnly": true, "imagesOnly": true, "maxItems": 1000, "maxPagesPerSearch": 10, "searchTerms": []})
for item in client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).iterate_items():
    print(item)

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This Actor is available through the Apify MCP server, so an AI agent can call it as a tool. Point your agent at https://mcp.apify.com and it can run the Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper on demand — for example: "Pull the first 500 artworks from Cleveland Museum of Art and summarise the price distribution." The agent receives the same structured rows you would get from the UI.

FAQ

Do I need a Cleveland Museum of Art account or API key?

No. The Actor reads publicly available pages only. There is nothing to authenticate and no credentials to rotate.

How many artworks can I get in one run?

As many as the search exposes. Raise Max pages per search and Max items together; the run stops at whichever limit it reaches first.

Why did I get fewer rows than I asked for?

The search ran out of artworks. That is normal for narrow queries — broaden the search or add more searches to one run.

Are results de-duplicated?

Yes. Each artwork is emitted once per run, even when it appears on several pages, so you are never billed twice for the same record.

Why are some fields empty?

Cleveland Museum of Art does not publish every attribute for every artwork. Empty means the source did not show it, not that extraction failed.

What export formats are supported?

JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML and RSS from the Output tab, plus the Apify API and any integration you connect.

How fast is it?

It is pure HTTP with no browser, so a page of results typically takes a second or two. Raise Max concurrency carefully — the source rate-limits aggressive crawling.

Can I schedule it?

Yes. Use the Apify scheduler to run it on any interval and append each run to the same dataset for time-series analysis.

Does it work behind a proxy?

It uses Apify Proxy automatically. You can switch groups or supply your own proxies in Proxy configuration.

How often does the data change?

Cleveland Museum of Art updates continuously. Re-run whenever you need current data; the Actor always reads the live pages, never a cache.

Is the output schema stable?

Yes. Field names and types are fixed, so downstream pipelines will not break between runs.

What if the site changes its layout?

Open an issue on the Issues tab and it gets fixed. The Actor is actively maintained.

Is it legal?

This Actor reads only publicly available pages on Cleveland Museum of Art — the same content any visitor sees without logging in. It does not bypass authentication, does not collect private data and does not attempt to defeat access controls. You are responsible for how you use the output: respect the source's terms of service, applicable copyright, and data-protection law such as GDPR where personal data is involved. Scraping public data is generally lawful in the EU and the US, but the responsibility for the downstream use of that data sits with you.

Related scrapers

• Art Institute Scraper — A second open-access collection
• Openverse Scraper — Openly licensed media
• Internet Archive Scraper — Archive metadata
• Wikidata Scraper — Structured reference data