How we opened up our private museum collection API

Your museum of screen culture in Melbourne (ACMI) went through a multi-year renewal, introducing the Story of the Moving Image (SOMI) to the public in February 2021. SOMI is an interactive free public experience exploring film, tv, videogames and art culture with First Nations story telling at its heart. To bring SOMI to life we built XOS, a museum experience operating system that links our collections management system to ~400 Raspberry Pis to display interactive museum labels, play our moving image content, and let you collect objects from the museum to take home and explore further. XOS exposes a range of private APIs within the ACMI network to feed the hungry machines, most of which require API Keys to read and write. When it came time to design and develop a public API, we wanted to prioritise: * Keeping our private museum APIs private * Making the public API secure * Making the public API fast * Making the public API easy to use * Making the public API searchable In this talk we’ll discuss the architecture and software we chose, why we chose it, and how it’s working out. We’ll also talk through the content licensing discussions we had to have to make it happen, and the timelines to go from prototype to production, including costs and our business case. We’ll finish up showing you a couple of experiments we built using the API, and what we’re hoping you (and we) might use it for in the future.