Research note · May 5, 2026
Built a semantic search engine that searches across museum collections simultaneously,...
The same 17th-century etching of a cow, held by both Harvard Art Museums and the Art Institute of Chicago, surfaced side by side by semantic search across ~170,000 open-access works.
articharvardartclevelandartrijksmuseumthemetlinkedculture
Built a semantic search engine that searches across museum collections simultaneously, automatically groups objects into clusters, and it immediately surfaced something interesting.
The first two results for a recent query: the same 17th-century etching of a cow, held by Harvard Art Museums and the Art Institute of Chicago. Neither museum's own search would have shown you both. You'd have to already know to look.
That's the whole point of LinkedCulture. Right now it indexes ~170,000 open-access works across Chicago, Harvard, Cleveland, Rijksmuseum, and the Met. Search once, discover across all of them, and occasionally find out that institutions on opposite sides of the Atlantic have been quietly holding the same object.