Open-Source Index Maps Museum Artifacts' Origins and Destinations

A new open‑source platform called **ex‑situ** is mapping museum artefacts as connecting arcs between their places of origin and the institutions that hold them. Developed by designer‑developer H. Burakyel, the project began as a Master’s thesis in 2022 and has since grown to index more than 100,000 objects from eight major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The system uses a flat data model to avoid imposing institutional taxonomies, and it stores only URLs to original images, keeping the responsibility for content with the source institutions. The front‑end is built with Next.js and Deck.gl, the back‑end uses Strapi, and a Python ETL pulls data from museum open‑access APIs. A recent addition allows researchers to export provenance data for filtered sets of artefacts.

The platform’s design emphasizes an “origin‑first” search interface that reveals the historical journey of objects, linking Western and Euro‑American collections with their original sites in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. By treating the index as a connective tissue rather than a hoster, ex‑situ avoids duplicating institutional data and instead directs users straight to the source. The project is released under AGPL‑3.0 and is available on GitHub, with a live demo accessible at exsitu.com. Burakyel has expressed a need for community input on scaling performance, code contributions, and data pipelines for museums lacking open‑access APIs.