Art Institute Print Catalog — Object Metadata

Turn the Art Institute of Chicago's public API into clean, per-record print-catalog metadata - one row per print object with title, artist, date, medium, dimensions and a public-domain flag, ready for collection-data buyers to enrich print inventories.

Each artwork from the Art Institute of Chicago public API becomes one clean, flat record with the public-domain flag normalized to a real boolean, a stable record_id (the object id), and provenance stamped on every row: source, endpoint, the CC0 notice, attribution, a UTC retrieval timestamp and an interpretation caveat.

What one record represents

The source is the Art Institute of Chicago public API (api.artic.edu), filtered to the print artwork type. Each record is one print object: its object id, title, the historical artist attribution line, display date, medium, dimensions, artwork type, classification, curatorial department, place of origin, and whether the object itself is public domain. It is exactly the metadata a collection- data buyer needs to enrich a print inventory.

Coverage and volume

The print artwork type matches 48,203 objects. The Art Institute search API caps a single query at 10,000 accessible results, so a single unfiltered run delivers up to that 10,000-object slice.

Live: 48,203 print matches, of which the source makes a 10,000-object slice accessible per query - matches the Wave-3 index figure (a 10,000 slice of 48,203) exactly.

To reach the whole 48,203-object set, use the Year from / Year to inputs: the Actor adds a date range to the search (verified live — for example prints made 1800-1850 return 5,818 objects, comfortably under the cap), so you can walk the full match set in year-range slices, each below the 10,000 limit.

Licence and attribution

The Art Institute releases its artwork metadata under CC0 (a public-domain dedication) — free to use without restriction. This Actor delivers metadata only: the free-text description field (which the API licenses separately under CC BY) and all images and IIIF identifiers are excluded, so nothing outside the CC0 metadata is redistributed. The full notice travels on every record:

Art Institute of Chicago (api.artic.edu). Artwork metadata released under CC0 (public-domain dedication). The free-text description field and all images/IIIF identifiers are excluded; no image, image URL or IIIF id is delivered.

The attribution — Art Institute of Chicago (api.artic.edu) — is present on every record, and the API's terms of use are the governing reference for the metadata.

Interpretation caveat

Print catalog metadata (artwork type Print). is_public_domain flags whether the object itself is public domain. artist_display is a historical attribution line; credit-line, provenance and image fields are excluded. The source caps a single query at 10,000 accessible results of 48,203 print matches - use the year range to partition beyond the cap.

Values are reproduced verbatim from the API; the Actor never rescales or rewrites a field.

Person-data policy

artist_display is a historical artist attribution on a catalogued (largely public-domain) object - it is part of the object record and is kept. Every other person-type field is excluded: the credit-line (which names donors), provenance text, and any cataloguer field are never selected, and no image or IIIF identifier is delivered. A per-record assertion enforces that allow-list (verified with a planted- field test). This is object metadata about artworks, not data about living people.

Data quality and freshness

is_public_domain is delivered as a real boolean. Every run re-reads the live API, so the data is as fresh as the museum's catalogue, and each record's observed_at stamp records when it was retrieved. Delivery is in the API's relevance order and keyed on the stable object id, so the dataset is safe to diff, deduplicate or upsert. The run's RUN_RECEIPT records the total match count and the 10,000 cap alongside how many records were delivered and charged.

Provenance and compliance

Every run reads api.artic.edu/robots.txt at runtime; the gate result (URL, status, byte length, SHA-256 of the policy) is written to the run's RUN_RECEIPT. The API is keyless. The Actor never bypasses a block or fetches through a mirror, and it stops cleanly when the source returns the 10,000- result cap.

Inputs

• Year from / Year to (optional) - a date range to partition the catalogue and reach beyond the 10,000-per-query cap.
• Maximum records (maxRecords) - hard cap on records delivered and billed (at most 10,000 per query).

Output

Records land in the Actor's default dataset and export as JSON, CSV, Excel or via the Apify API. A tabular overview view surfaces object id, title, artist, date, medium, type, classification, department and the public-domain flag.

Fields in detail

The record leads with record_id and object_id, then title, artist_display, date_display, medium_display, dimensions, artwork_type, classification, department, place_of_origin and the boolean is_public_domain. The provenance block closes every record, so a single row is self-describing and audit-ready. Because the object id is stable, this dataset joins cleanly onto any collection system that already stores Art Institute ids.

Scaling and limits

Set Maximum records low to sample cheaply, or up to the 10,000-per-query cap for a full slice. The Actor pages the API and delivers incrementally, so memory stays flat, and you are billed only for what is delivered. The one hard boundary is the source's own 10,000-result cap on a single query; to pull the whole 48,203-object print corpus, run the Actor once per year range (for example 1700-1799, 1800-1849, 1850-1899, and so on) so each slice stays under the cap, then concatenate - every record already carries its stable object id, so the slices deduplicate cleanly. Because the catalogue changes slowly, a scheduled monthly run is enough to keep a downstream table current; each run re-stamps observed_at.

Sibling Actors

This Actor is a museum-metadata cell — a new domain for the fleet. It shares its engineering - the runtime robots gate, push-then-charge billing and verbatim-value discipline - with the fleet's other public-data records Actors.

Sample output

Real rows from a live run of this actor (first 5 rows, selected columns).

One full record from the same run, exactly as delivered:

{
  "object_id": 89503,
  "title": "Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series \"Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei)\"",
  "artist_display": "Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾 北斎\nJapanese, 1760-1849",
  "date_display": "1830/33",
  "medium_display": "Color woodblock print; oban",
  "dimensions": "25.4 × 37.6 cm (10 × 14 3/4 in.)",
  "artwork_type": "Print",
  "classification": "woodblock print",
  "department": "Arts of Asia",
  "place_of_origin": "Japan",
  "is_public_domain": true,
  "record_id": "89503",
  "source": "Art Institute of Chicago (api.artic.edu)",
  "source_dataset": "artworks/search",
  "licence": "Art Institute of Chicago (api.artic.edu). Artwork metadata released under CC0 (public-domain dedication). The free-text description field and all images/IIIF identifiers are excluded; no image, image URL or IIIF id is delivered.",
  "attribution": "Art Institute of Chicago (api.artic.edu)",
  "caveat": "Print catalog metadata (artwork type Print). is_public_domain flags whether the object itself is public domain. artist_display is a historical attribution line; credit-line, provenance and image fields are excluded. The source caps a single query at 10,000 accessible results of 48,203 print matches - use the year range to partition beyond the cap.",
  "observed_at": "2026-09-25T17:17:49Z"
}

Pricing

This Actor uses Apify's pay-per-event model: a flat $0.05 per record actually delivered to the dataset, and nothing else — no monthly rental, no per-run base fee, no compute charge. Deliver 40 records and you pay $2.00; deliver 10,000 and you pay $500.00. Billing is wired after delivery — each record is pushed first and only then does the per-record event fire — so a mid-run failure can only ever under-charge you, never over-charge. Use Maximum records to cap spend precisely.

Typical uses

Enrich a print inventory with titles, artists, dates, media and dimensions; screen a collection for public-domain objects; build a research or catalogue reference; partition the full print corpus by year for a complete pull; or feed a collection-management or art-market model with clean object metadata.

What this Actor does not do

It does not deliver images, image URLs or IIIF identifiers (CC0 covers metadata only); it does not include credit-line, provenance or cataloguer fields; and it does not alter any published value. It gives you faithful, CC0, analysis-ready object metadata - one row per print - with a provenance trail you can audit on every run. Every field is the museum's own catalogue value, reproduced exactly, so the record is as authoritative as the source and needs no reconciliation before you load it.