Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Collections provides a REST-ish style application programming interface (API) for developers to use in their products and services. API requests are made by passing one or more query parameters to https://api.collection.cooperhewitt.org/rest/.

Please consult the API method documentation for complete details. We've also written about the API at a high level on our blog.

Get Started Now!

The fastest way to get started with the Cooper Hewitt API is by creating an access token for yourself. After that, you might want to read the documentation.

If you want to create an application for other Cooper Hewitt account holders, then you probably want to start by creating an API key. OAuth (version 2) access tokens are used to monitor and limit access to the API. Not all flavours of OAuth2 token-dancing are supported. Applications need to be configured with a fixed callback URL on the server-side and request access tokens by authenticating users using implicit grant tokens, aka section 4.2 of the OAuth2 specification. Please consult the OAuth2 How To page for details.