Documentation of Data Services
ECT, Europe Container Terminals © René de Wit
june 29, 2026
We have changed the redirect behaviour of the Linked Data Resolver: requests for id.rijksmuseum.nl/{identifier} now no longer first redirect to data.rijksmuseum.nl, but either directly redirect to the Collection Online website when accessed in a browser, or directly serve data about an entity when accessed programmatically or with content negotiation query parameters.
Requests for data.rijksmuseum.nl/{identifier} now directly serve data, no longer redirecting browsers.
Additionally, to avoid confusion, we have stopped referring to two separate PIDs per entity, in favour of considering id.rijksmuseum.nl/{identifier} PIDs the only canonical LOD/RDF URI and persistent identifier, while data.rijksmuseum.nl/{identifier} is merely a data API URL. Please update any links you have pointing to identifiers on the data domain, and use the id domain instead, unless the intention is to link to the API outside of an LOD context.
See the Linked Data Resolver page for the updated documentation.
june 11, 2026
In the coming weeks we will be releasing a new version of our OAI-PMH API, in which the Europeana Data Model (EDM) representations provided are valid according to Europeana's XML Schema and Schematron validation rules.
This update may have breaking changes for your usecase, depending on the way you consume the EDM data: if you use the EDM data as a graph, nothing will change. If you parse the XML, please refer to the EDM documentation (https://pro.europeana.eu/page/edm-documentation) for more information about the structure of EDM data.
Object metadata
Metadata of objects in the Rijksmuseum collection can be accessed in multiple ways. You can use the OAI-PMH API, the Search API or the LDES API to harvest collection data. The complete collection is also available for download. Data is connected by concepts and agents within the controlled vocabularies of the museum. Object metadata can also be obtained in different formats using the persistent identifier resolver.
Bibliographic metadata
The Rijksmuseum supports the SRU client/server protocol for searching and retrieving bibliographic records from the library database.
Controlled vocabularies
Controlled vocabularies contain data about actors, places, events and concepts. Controlled vocabularies of the Rijksmuseum are available as downloads.