Open Source at Cooper Hewitt

White plastic parts with various pegs and holes on a black background

Resources

Cooper Hewitt is committed to making its collections, knowledge, and resources as accessible and useful as possible. Here you can find the growing list of tools and resources that the museum has made available under a variety of liberal license conditions which are, where possible, global in application.

For all other resources not listed here, standard Smithsonian terms-of-use apply. We encourage you to make use of the Fair Use doctrine (or equivalent) in your jurisdiction. The College Art Association has a useful primer on Fair Use as it applies to art museum resources in the USA.

Open data and public API

Collection data, excluding images, is released under Creative Commons Zero. It is available as a downloadable spreadsheet, as individual JSON files, and through our public API. Learn more about this in our Developers section.

Anonymized and obfuscated data generated by Cooper Hewitt’s Pen is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license. It is available as a downloadable .csv file on our GitHub account.

3D model of the Carnegie Mansion and interiors

A high resolution 3D model of the Mansion including textures and interiors, is available for download under Creative Commons Zero. Learn more about these models, how they were made, and how to download them and explore a 3D fly through.

Cooper Hewitt: The typeface

As part of our rebranding, Cooper Hewitt commissioned a custom typeface from Pentagram and Chester Jenkins. This typeface is available for unrestricted reuse under an Open Font License.

Source code and developer tools

Cooper Hewitt Labs writes a lot of software in-house and where possible these are released under a mix of open licenses depending upon their underlying libraries. These can be found in our Github repository.

Featured Image: The Free Universal Construction Kit, Free Art and Technology [F.A.T.] Lab and Sy-Lab.