search museums victoria's collections api for items, species, and specimens
domain: collections.museumsvictoria.com.au · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
review the developer docs at collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/developers — no API key required, but every request must include a User-Agent header (it can be blank, but must be present)
call GET https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/api/search?query={term}&recordtype={type} to search across articles, items, species, and specimens, using perpage (up to 100) to control page size
call GET https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/api/items/{id} (or /api/species/{id}, /api/specimens/{id}, /api/articles/{id}) to fetch a specific record's full details
filter search results with the recordtype parameter (article, item, species, or specimen) to scope queries to the collection type you need
inspect each record's media array for image URLs and associated licensing before reuse
Known gotchas
requests without a User-Agent header are rejected, even though the header value itself can be blank — this trips up HTTP clients that omit it by default
results default to 40 per page; explicitly set perpage (max 100) for larger batches, and paginate beyond that
the API spans four different record types (article/item/species/specimen) with different field shapes — don't assume one schema fits all recordtype values
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