cfpramod/open-museum-mcp

Overview

An MCP server that provides a federated search across three open-access museum collections (The Met, Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago). It normalizes results into a common schema, supports dynasty-aware date parsing, and enforces a strict-default license gate to ensure only reusable works are returned.

Best for

Best for
Developers building cultural heritage applications or research tools that need aggregated search across open-access museum datasets

Use cases

• Query multiple museum APIs through a single unified MCP interface
• Filter artworks by license to guarantee open-access reuse
• Search with dynasty-specific date terms for historical collections

How to use

Tools exposed

• search_artworks
• get_artwork
• cite

Tested with

Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, Cline, Goose, Continue, Zed

Example client config

{\n  "mcpServers": {\n    "open-museum": {\n      "command": "npx",\n      "args": ["-y", "open-museum-mcp"]\n    }\n  }\n}

Notes

An MCP server that provides a federated search across three open-access museum collections (The Met, Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago). It normalizes results into a common schema, supports dynasty-aware date parsing, and enforces a strict-default license gate to ensure only reusable works are returned.

5 stars on GitHub. Last updated 2026-05-23. Licensed MIT.

Use cases

• Query multiple museum APIs through a single unified MCP interface
• Filter artworks by license to guarantee open-access reuse
• Search with dynasty-specific date terms for historical collections

Pros

• Federated access to major open-access museum collections
• Normalized schema reduces integration effort
• Dynasty-aware date parsing for non-Western artworks

Cons

• Limited to three museums, may not cover niche collections
• Requires an MCP-compatible client or agent to use
• License verification depends on each museum’s metadata quality

Indexed from awesome-mcp-servers-punkpeye and enriched against its public facts.