LinkedCulture
Search cultural collections by meaning, not just matching words.
Explore open-access museum records through semantic search across institutions, themes, materials, symbols, and visual ideas.
Search
Try a concept, visual description, material, cultural theme, or interpretive phrase.
Complete verification to search LinkedCulture.
Research context
LinkedCulture tests whether semantic search can improve discovery across cultural heritage metadata when users search by concept, mood, symbol, material, or meaning instead of exact catalog terms.
The prototype currently searches a unified index of 217,643 open-access records across six museum collections using Ollama embeddings and Qdrant vector search.
Counts updated 2026-05-09.
Read methodology
Traditional keyword search works well when the query matches the record. It struggles when the search is conceptual, ambiguous, visual, or metaphorical. LinkedCulture evaluates whether vector embeddings can surface useful relationships across records even when the words do not match directly.
Object metadata from open-access museum collections is transformed into high-dimensional vectors using nomic-embed-text:latest served via Ollama. Those vectors are indexed in Qdrant and returned through source-specific and cross-collection search modes.
Active collections
Art Institute of Chicago
58,443 records
Rijksmuseum
47,156 records
Cleveland Museum of Art
41,279 records
Getty Museum
59,979 records
Harvard Art Museums
6,509 records
Met
4,277 records
Under review: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa — coming soon