Recommended first step for open-ended or topic discovery: free-text search across 14.5 million Smithsonian objects, with optional exact filters. Filters narrow by museum unit, object type, indexed date term, culture, geographic place, subject topic, named party, and online/CC0 availability. Returns curated summaries (title, date, museum, thumbnail URL, CC0 flag) with the total match count. The record_id in each result is the identifier for smithsonian_get_object, smithsonian_find_related, and smithsonian_get_media. To browse one exact category — a single museum, culture, date term, object type, or topic — use smithsonian_browse_category instead.
Enumerate the valid term vocabulary for an indexed Smithsonian filter field (unit_code, culture, place, date, online_media_type, topic). Terms are a controlled vocabulary — often plural or qualified (e.g. "Paintings", not "Painting") — so guessed filter values tend to return nothing. Returns a page of the field's distinct term values; large vocabularies (topic has 133k terms, place 114k) page via start and rows. For unit_code, each code is returned with its museum name and contains matches the name as well as the code, so a museum name resolves to its code in one call.
Fetch a normalized catalog metadata projection for a Smithsonian object by its record_id (from smithsonian_search_objects results). Returns the exposed catalog fields — title, dates, description, makers, materials, dimensions, places, cultures, topics, exhibitions, credit line, identifiers, rights, and a media summary. The media summary is a count; full image URLs come from smithsonian_get_media.
Return every CC0 (open-access) image for a Smithsonian object at multiple resolutions. The tool never returns an empty list — it names the reason instead: an object with nothing digitized, an object whose media is entirely non-image (scanned books, 3D models, sound recordings), and an object whose images are entirely non-CC0 each fail with their own reason. Each image entry includes thumbnail (~120px), screen-size (~800px), and high-resolution JPEG/TIFF URLs with pixel dimensions. The cc0_only filter on smithsonian_search_objects surfaces objects that have downloadable CC0 images.
Browse Smithsonian objects within one exact category — a single museum (mode "museum"), culture, indexed date term (mode "period"), object type (mode "medium"), or subject term (mode "topic"). The value must be an exact indexed category term, not free text: resolve museum, culture, period, and topic vocabulary with smithsonian_list_terms first (object_type is not enumerable there — harvest it from smithsonian_search_objects results, and treat each casing as its own category, since a harvested object_type covers only the casing it was written in). Returns the category total count, a page of matching objects, and a museum breakdown of that page; page the full category with start and rows. For open-ended or topic discovery, start with smithsonian_search_objects instead.
Discover objects across Smithsonian collections related to a given anchor object, matched on shared metadata signals — culture, period, object type, named parties, and topic terms. Each related object is tagged with the signals that connected it to the anchor; a named-party signal carries the catalog's own role for that party (maker, Collector, Donor, issuing authority, …), not a fixed "maker" label. Matches surface across museums — an NASM aerospace anchor can pull related objects from NMNHPALEO, SAAM, and NMAH.