Arthub Flanders, developed in 2016, is a collaborative project between the Flemish Art Collection (VKC), the official museum representatives for Flanders, and Meemoo, the Flemish archive institute. This innovative open source platform serves as a public discovery interface, offering users access to comprehensive information about the collections of Flanders' museums, specifically in the realm of visual arts.
So, what is Arthub Flanders, precisely? It acts as a powerful search engine for accessing information about objects housed in Flanders' visual arts museums. Notably, all the metadata related to these objects is made available as open data, ensuring that this information can be used and repurposed by anyone interested in creating their own applications.
As of now, Arthub Flanders hosts a substantial collection of 23,745 object descriptions from prestigious institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, the Royal Museum for Fine Arts Antwerp, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, and Mu.ZEE Ostend. The platform, however, intends to further expand its coverage by including collections from other Flemish museums, promising a broader and richer resource for users.
Arthub Flanders is built on various open source solutions, reflecting a commitment to collaboration and community involvement. One key open source project within Arthub Flanders is the Project Blacklight, which provides a custom search and browsing interface for cultural heritage objects. This platform utilises the Apache Solr search engine for searching full text and metadata, accompanied by a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front end. Project Blacklight is released under an Apache 2.0 licence. Arthub Flanders, as an instance of Project Blacklight, tailors this platform for searching and browsing cultural heritage objects.
Another integral component is The Datahub, an open source metadata aggregator with web-based APIs. The Datahub features both a REST API that provides metadata in JSON format and an OAI-PMH API. It uses the Symfony Framework and MongoDB for storage, it was also developed by the Flemish administration and is here reused as part of this project.
Catmandu, a versatile data processing toolkit, is also integrated, offering data conversion capabilities. Part of the wider LibreCat project, a group of European library developers, Catmandu is led by a local developer of the Ghent university.
The diverse audience of Arthub Flanders includes museum professionals, researchers, technical developers, historians, educators, policymakers, students, the creative industries, and the general public who share an interest in art collections. Users and developers are encouraged to participate in the ongoing development of this software by submitting issues, suggesting changes, or making contributions, thereby actively shaping the growth of Arthub Flanders and enhancing its capabilities.