Met Museum Object Catalog Evidence API

Retrieve selected public Met Museum object catalog metadata for exact known IDs. At most5 object requests, no search or enumeration. Keep object ID, title, accession number, department, medium, dimension text, object-date text, culture, object page URL and declared isPublicDomain. Returned numeric identity is checked. Date/dimensions are literal catalog text, not parsed calendar dates, physical verification or converted measurements. Accession numbers need not be globally unique; object ID is the snapshot identity.

No image, IIIF, file, full description, biography, artist/constituent identity, ownership/provenance trail or profile endpoint is fetched or emitted. The public-domain flag is a museum declaration, not an independent legal conclusion or image permission check. Object URLs are provenance data and are never followed. Met Open Access catalog data is published for commercial/noncommercial reuse under CC0; media can have separate rights. This Actor only selects metadata. Metadata can be incomplete, revised or unavailable; a404/error is not a valid empty object.

Quick start

{"objectIds": [436535, 436532]}

Pricing and budget

0.0007 USD per emitted object catalog observation (0.7 USD per1000), plus0.005 USD startup at default256MB. Higher memory can multiply startup events; check effective Store pricing. Failed/empty sources do not emit result charges; startup can still apply. At zero result budget, input validation occurs but no upstream request is sent, and rowsAvailable is null (unknown). A positive budget can request the bounded source set before output; emission stops at the result cap and complete=false/PARTIAL_BUDGET reports truncation.

Snapshot, integration and limits

Use dataset rows together with OUTPUT and SNAPSHOT. Pass SNAPSHOT.previousHashes as previousHashes in a later run. NO_BASELINE/FIRST_SEEN/UNCHANGED/CHANGED compare only selected metadata including itemKey and sourceUrl; missing records are not deletions. FIRST_SEEN means absent from the supplied baseline. There is no persistent hidden state or automatic polling. Export JSON/CSV/Excel through the default dataset.

API example: POST https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/soilair~met-museum-object-catalog-evidence-api/runs with your Apify Authorization header and the JSON input above. Poll the returned run; read dataset items and OUTPUT/SNAPSHOT records using its store IDs. Do not place tokens or confidential data in input. No upstream key is needed. Results live in Apify run storage according to retention; no separate analytics service.

Only fixed HTTPS provider endpoints are constructed from validated identifiers. Public-IP DNS validation, pinned connections, TLS hostname verification,2MiB decoded responses, approximately95 seconds of network budget, at most5 same-provider redirects. Official API calls are distinct from website crawling; no arbitrary URLs or HTML pages. No linked documents/files are fetched. Queries are sequential with1-second spacing. Provider403/429 or Retry-After stops later calls; retry instructions are reported and no retry/proxy/circumvention is attempted. Shared IP limits and changes to upstream services can still block runs. Caller must respect provider headers and cache/reduce repeated requests. Text is data and should not be executed.

Developed with AI assistance. Tests and live/cloud comparisons qualify the selected-field contract; they do not prove commercial demand, provider uptime or a legal/license determination. Support: share a run ID and expected fields, without credentials or private material.

References: https://metmuseum.github.io/