Harvard Art Museums Collection Scraper

Harvard Art Museums Collection Scraper

Scrape the Harvard Art Museums collection by keyword, classification, culture, or century, up to a million artworks per run. Each record includes title, artist, date, medium, and image URL. No API key required. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

The Harvard Art Museums collection spans over 250,000 objects, but browsing it manually is slow and the official API requires registration and rate limits. This scraper reads the public collection pages directly, filtered by keyword, classification, culture, or century, and returns each artwork in one fixed schema.

Who uses it	What they scrape Harvard Art Museums for
Art historians	Building a dataset of works by a specific artist or period for research
Museum professionals	Comparing collection holdings across institutions
Data analysts	Analyzing trends in acquisition dates, media, or cultural origins
Educators	Creating teaching sets of images and metadata for art history courses

What it does

This Actor collects Harvard Art Museums artworks by keyword, classification, culture, or century, and returns each one as a flat row with title, artist, date, medium, and image URL.

• 🔍 Keyword search: find artworks by title or artist, such as 'monet' or 'landscape'.
• 🎨 Classification filter: limit to Paintings, Prints, Photographs, Drawings, Sculpture, Coins, and more.
• 🌍 Culture filter: narrow to French, Chinese, American, Egyptian, or any culture in the collection.
• 📅 Century filter: restrict to a specific century like '19th century' or '20th century'.
• 📊 Sort options: order by relevance, most viewed, or oldest first.
• 📦 Bulk export: collect up to 1,000,000 artworks per run and export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

Results export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML, or straight from the API.

What you can do with Harvard Art Museums data

📚 Build a research dataset.

An art historian runs the scraper with classification 'Paintings' and culture 'French' to compile a list of all French paintings in the Harvard Art Museums for a study on 19th-century techniques.

📈 Analyze collection trends.

A data analyst collects all artworks sorted by date to visualize acquisition patterns and medium usage over centuries.

🖼️ Create a teaching resource.

An educator searches for 'landscape' and filters to '19th century' to download images and metadata for a class on Romanticism.

🔎 Compare institutional holdings.

A museum professional scrapes all sculptures to compare the Harvard collection with other museums' public datasets.

Why choose this scraper

	What you get
No API key	Scrapes the public collection pages directly, no registration or rate limits.
Fixed schema	Every artwork returns the same fields: title, artist, date, medium, image URL, and more.
Flexible filters	Combine keyword, classification, culture, and century to target exactly what you need.
Scalable	Collect from 1 to 1,000,000 artworks in a single run.
Export ready	Download as CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML for analysis or integration.

How it compares

No other Store actor targets Harvard Art Museums the same way, so the honest comparison is with the alternatives teams actually weigh.

	Harvard Art Museums Collection Scraper	Build it in-house	By hand
Setup	Run it now, zero config	Days of engineering	None, but hours per pull
When Harvard Art Museums changes	Maintained for you	You fix it	You re-learn the page
Proxies, retries, anti-bot	Built in	Your problem	Browser only
Output	Fixed JSON schema, CSV/Excel export	Whatever you build	Copy-paste
Cost	Pay per result	Engineering time	Analyst hours

Configure the run

Drive the Actor with a keyword, classification, culture, or century, alone or together, and set the maximum number of artworks to collect per run. The Input tab lists every parameter.

A first run with the defaults:

{
  "classification": "Paintings",
  "maxItems": 10
}

A larger pull:

{
  "classification": "Paintings",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Pricing

Pay-per-result: $0.004 per result collected. You pay only for the results written to your dataset.

Results collected	Approximate cost
100 results	$0.40
1,000 results	$4.00
10,000 results	$40.00

New Apify accounts start with $5 in free credit.

Free users

Free-plan runs return up to 10 results as a preview. Upgrade your Apify plan to collect up to 1,000,000 results per run.

Run it

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 in credit.
2. Open the Harvard Art Museums Collection Scraper.
3. Set your inputs and any filters, then click Start.
4. Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.

Run it programmatically through the Apify API (run-sync-get-dataset-items) or the ApifyClient for JavaScript and Python.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Give an AI agent live access to Harvard Art Museums through the Model Context Protocol. Add the Actor to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client:

claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=parseforge/harvardart-museums-scraper"

Then prompt it in plain language to run the scraper and read back the results.

Troubleshooting

Why am I getting no results?

Check your filters. If you set a keyword or classification that does not exist in the collection, no results will be returned. Try broadening your search or leaving fields empty to browse the whole collection.

The run is taking too long.

Reduce the maximum artworks or narrow your filters. The scraper processes each artwork individually, so a large number of results will take longer.

Some fields are empty in the output.

Not all artworks have complete metadata. Fields like artist or date may be blank if the museum record does not include them.

I get an error about invalid classification.

The classification field is free text, but it must match the museum's classification exactly. Check the Harvard Art Museums website for valid classification names.

FAQ

Question	Answer
Do I need an API key to scrape the Harvard Art Museums collection?	No, this scraper reads the public collection pages directly, so no API key or registration is required.
Can I filter by artist name?	Yes, use the keyword field to search by artist name, such as 'monet' or 'picasso'.
What classifications are available?	Common classifications include Paintings, Prints, Photographs, Drawings, Sculpture, and Coins. You can enter any classification used by the museum.
How many artworks can I collect in one run?	You can set the maximum artworks from 1 to 1,000,000 per run.
What fields are returned for each artwork?	Each artwork returns a flat row with fields such as title, artist, date, medium, image URL, and more, depending on what is available in the collection record.
Can I sort the results?	Yes, you can sort by relevance, most viewed, or oldest first using the sortBy option.
What export formats are supported?	You can export the results to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.
Is the scraper limited to Harvard Art Museums only?	Yes, this scraper is specifically for the Harvard Art Museums collection at harvardartmuseums.org.
Can I combine filters, like classification and century?	Yes, all filters can be combined. For example, set classification to 'Paintings' and century to '19th century' to get only 19th-century paintings.
Does the scraper handle pagination automatically?	Yes, it automatically paginates through all results up to the maximum number you set.

Related actors

• met-museum-scraper: Scrape The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection instead.

Browse the full ParseForge collection for more scrapers.

🆘 Need help? Email parseforge@protonmail.com with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.

⚠️ Disclaimer. This Actor is unofficial and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by President and Fellows of Harvard College. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using the collected data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable data-protection laws, including GDPR, CCPA, and PIPL. Do not use it to collect personal data unlawfully.