A service of the MHS Data Lab

Formerly known as "The Web Office" and sometimes as the "Mohistory Lab", the Data Lab is a unit within the Missouri Historical Society that delivers technology solutions and services focused on museum collections, exhibits and community engagaement.

The Lab deals with public access materials from a number of disperate sources, and though there are many internal APIs useful for particular applications, the curation of usable public data stripped of application-specific fields is an ongoing project which will be made available through this API. We mean to meet testable, open standards, and this will conform to the Open API spec in time.

Online Collections

Images and metadata are separately discoverable, but they can be accessed with similar parameters. You can search the collections by posting raw json to the endpoint below and view any collection by its id with a web browser.

• POSThttps://api.mohistory.org/search/collections - generates a list of records from a posted Search Object.
• Example Search Object

                   {
  		  "#":null,
  		  "redirect":"",
  		  "from":60, 
  		  "size":20,
  		  "page":1,
  		  "layout":"detail",
                    "images": true,
                    "text": [
                      "rush hour"
                    ],
                    "department": [
                      "Photos and Prints Collections"
                    ],
                    "collection": [
                      "St. Louis Streets"
                    ],
                    "decade": [
                      "1920-1929"
                    ],
                    "creator": [
                      "W.C. Persons"
                    ],
                    "type": [
                      "Photograph"
                    ],
                    "subject": [
                      "St. Louis Street Scenes"
                    ],
                    "place": [
                      "St Louis"
                    ]
                  }
                

• GEThttps://api.mohistory.org/records/collections/item/‹id› - returns the collection record for a particular item with a given id.

Image Data

Images are available individually and by IIIF protocols. They can be graphically browsed at '/images'. A crawlable manifest of all images will be made available in time.

Data Sets

There are a number of data sources at the Missouri Historical Society outside of traditional databases and structured forms. The datasets presented here are curated independantly. A graphically browsable interface with downloadable spreadsheets will be made available in time.

• GEThttps://api.mohistory.org/datasets - generates a list of flat datasets with fields listed by type, length, and name
• GEThttps://api.mohistory.org/datasets/‹dataset› - provides the full dump of the corresponding data as JSON.