About U.S. Museums Guide

U.S. Museums Guide is a reference for museums across the United States. Start from a state or a museum type and browse, or search for a museum by name and see exactly where it stands on the map.

Why we built it

The country has tens of thousands of museums — art, history, science, children’s museums, botanical gardens, zoos and more. The underlying records are public, but they are scattered and hard to browse. U.S. Museums Guide gathers them into one structured, mapped, browsable guide so a curious reader, a traveler, or a researcher can find an answer quickly.

Where our data comes from

The core catalogue is drawn from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Museum Data Files, a public-domain U.S. federal dataset last published in 2018. Where a museum has a well-sourced encyclopedic description, we add a short narrative quoted verbatim from Wikipedia (available under CC BY-SA 4.0) and a photo from Wikimedia Commons, each cited on the page. We never invent facts about a museum: where we have no verified description, we show the record without one rather than write something unverified.

Who is behind it

U.S. Museums Guide is built and operated by Purcell Analytics. We build data-driven reference sites that answer a specific question well. You can reach the team at hello@museumsguide.co.