Victoria & Albert Museum Collections Scraper

Scrape the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) — the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design — straight from its free, key-less Collections API v2. Get structured objects with makers, materials, techniques, dates, places of origin, dimensions and high-quality IIIF images.

No API key. No login. ~$0.50 per 1,000 objects in Apify platform usage.

What you get

Every object is one clean, flat record:

Field	Description
system_number	V&A internal id (e.g. O72610)
accession_number	Museum accession number
title	Object title
object_type	e.g. Chair, Teapot, Kimono
maker / maker_association	Designer/maker and their role
date_text	Production date
brief_description	Short description (≤2000 chars)
physical_description	Detailed physical description (≤3000, detail only)
materials / techniques / categories	Lists (detail only)
place_of_origin	Where it was made (detail only)
dimensions	Compact dimension string (detail only)
collection_code	V&A collection code
on_display / gallery	Whether it is on display and where
image_id / image_url / has_image	IIIF image id + a ready 400×400 image URL
url	Public V&A page for the object
source	Always vam
scraped_at	ISO timestamp

Image URLs use the V&A IIIF server, e.g. https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/{image_id}/full/!400,400/0/default.jpg (verified to resolve). Change the size segment for larger renders.

Modes

• search — run one or more queries (chair, teapot, kimono, a maker's name, a keyword…) with optional material / year / images filters. Each hit is optionally enriched with its full object record.
• objects — pass explicit V&A system numbers and get their full records.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
mode	select	search	search or objects
queries	array	["chair","teapot","kimono"]	Search terms (search mode)
systemNumbers	array	[]	System numbers (objects mode)
materialFilter	string	—	AAT material id, e.g. AAT12849
yearFrom / yearTo	int	—	Production-year range
withImagesOnly	bool	false	Only objects that have an image
enrichDetails	bool	true	Fetch full object records (richer, slower)
maxItems	int	200	Hard cap (max 3000)

Example

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": ["kimono", "art deco"],
  "yearFrom": 1900,
  "yearTo": 1940,
  "withImagesOnly": true,
  "enrichDetails": true,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Use cases

• Art & design datasets for ML, catalogues and analysis
• Design research — trace materials, techniques and makers over time
• Education — build teaching resources from a world-class collection
• Digital exhibitions — power galleries with IIIF imagery and rich metadata

How this differs from my other museum scrapers

This actor is dedicated to the V&A — applied arts and design (furniture, fashion, ceramics, textiles, metalwork, jewellery, product design). It is a different institution and API from my other museum actors:

• Met Museum Scraper — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), encyclopedic fine-art collection.
• Museum Collections Scraper — Europeana / Smithsonian / Art Institute of Chicago aggregators.
• Cleveland Art Scraper — Cleveland Museum of Art open-access collection.
• Europeana Scraper — pan-European cultural-heritage aggregator.

If you want design and decorative-arts objects specifically, use this one.

Data licensing & terms

Data comes from the public V&A Collections API. The V&A provides its collection data and IIIF images primarily for personal, educational and research (non-commercial) use; many images are made available for creative and academic reuse, but rights vary object-by-object and some records carry third-party rights or content warnings. You are responsible for checking the rights and credit line of each object on its V&A page before reuse, and for complying with the V&A API terms. This actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Run locally

pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m src.main
python3 tests/test_mapper.py   # offline smoke tests