smithsonian-mcp-server

Search across 19.4 million Smithsonian objects by text query and optional filters. Filters narrow by museum unit, object type, decade, culture, geographic place, 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.

Enumerate the valid term vocabulary for an indexed Smithsonian filter field (unit_code, culture, place, date, online_media_type). Smithsonian uses a controlled vocabulary where terms are often plural or qualified (e.g. "Paintings", not "Painting"), so filter values guessed rather than drawn from this vocabulary tend to return empty results. Returns a page of the field's distinct term values; large vocabularies (place has 100k+ terms) page via start and rows.

Fetch a normalized catalog metadata projection for a Smithsonian object by its record_id (from smithsonian_search results). Returns the exposed catalog fields — title, dates, description, makers, materials, dimensions, place and culture associations, topics, exhibition history, credit line, accession identifiers, rights statement, and a media summary. The media summary is a count; full image URLs come from smithsonian_get_media.

Return all available CC0 images for a Smithsonian object at multiple resolutions. Only CC0 (open access) images are returned; an object whose media is entirely non-CC0 yields no downloadable images. 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 surfaces objects that have downloadable CC0 images.

Browse Smithsonian collections by category to answer "what does the Smithsonian have about X?" questions. Constructs and executes a category-constrained search, then returns an overview: total count, a curated set of sample objects, and a breakdown of which museums hold matching objects. Four browse modes: museum (by unit code or name), culture (by culture term), period (by decade), medium (by object type). Use as the entry point for open-ended research.

Discover objects across Smithsonian collections related to a given anchor object, matched on shared metadata signals — culture, period, object type, maker names, and topic terms. Each related object is tagged with the signals that connected it to the anchor. Cross-museum discovery is the differentiator — an NASM aerospace anchor may surface related objects from NMNH, SAAM, and NMAH.