List the museum data sources this server can query and whether each is currently available. Sources needing an API key are unavailable until the key is configured.

Search museum collections for artworks. Returns compact results including a source and id used with get_artwork or get_artwork_image.

IMPORTANT — this matches keywords against catalog metadata; it is not semantic search. Artist names, titles, cultures, and periods work well. Descriptions of subject matter work badly: a query like 'man crossing a bridge' matches any record containing 'man', 'bridge', or names like 'Bridges' and 'Cross', and buries the relevant results.

So translate the user's intent into catalog vocabulary before calling. If you can name a likely artist, school, or title from your own knowledge, search for that instead — e.g. prefer 'Hokusai' or 'Hiroshige Tokaido' over 'japanese painting of a bridge'. Searching a subject phrase directly is a last resort; if you must, use one or two distinctive nouns rather than a sentence.

Results are ordered by each museum's own relevance ranking, which is often weak — scan the whole list rather than assuming the first hit is best.

CHOOSING A SOURCE. 'all' is a fine default, but naming a source is much better when the work has an obvious home. Five of the ten sources hold mostly Western art (met, artic, cleveland, harvard, rijksmuseum); for anything else, reach for these first:

• Japanese art and objects → 'japansearch' (Japan's national aggregator), then 'vam', 'met'

• Chinese, Korean, South and Southeast Asian, Islamic → 'vam', then 'smithsonian'

• African art → 'smithsonian' with unit_code:NMAfA in the query, then 'vam'

• Indigenous Americas and pre-Columbian → 'smithsonian' with unit_code:NMAI

• Māori and Pacific → 'tepapa'

• Latin American art, and anywhere else with no museum API → 'wikidata'

Source-specific quirks worth knowing:

• 'smithsonian' accepts field filters in the query, so unit_code:NMAfA or unit_code:FSG (Asian art) narrows 21 museums to one. Write it as a plain AND term — 'Nasca AND unit_code:NMAI' — and do not parenthesise it, which makes the filter silently drop. Note that unit_code:NMAI returns metadata but essentially never images, so use it to find and read about Indigenous American works, not to display them.

• 'japansearch' catalogs in Japanese and has no English titles — query it in Japanese ('北斎', '浮世絵') for good recall, and expect titles to come back in Japanese with a language field marking them; that is correct output, not a failure.

• 'tepapa' images are mostly 'All Rights Reserved' under Te Papa's cultural protocols for taonga Māori. They can still be fetched and viewed, but check license from get_artwork before suggesting a work can be reused.

Fetch full catalog details for a single artwork by its source and id (as returned by search_artworks) — medium, dimensions, department, culture, where it was made, credit line, and rights where the museum publishes them. Use this to confirm attribution or rights before relying on a work, since search results carry only a summary.

Rights come back in two fields: isPublicDomain is a boolean and is only set when the source states it outright, while license carries the source's own wording (e.g. 'CC0', 'CC BY-NC-SA', 'In copyright'). Prefer license when advising on reuse — an absent isPublicDomain means unknown, not free.

Download the image for a single artwork (by source and id) and return it so it can actually be viewed, plus a short caption. Use this whenever the user wants to see a work, or when you need to judge what a work actually depicts rather than trusting its title.

Not every record has an image, and the Art Institute ('artic') serves images from a host behind a bot challenge, so those usually fail with a 403 — prefer another source when you need to display something, and fall back to the museumUrl from search results if an image cannot be fetched.