---
title: Data & Formats
description: What you can get out of a Preservated-hosted museum site, and in which shapes.
section: formats
order: 1
updated: 2026-07-11
verified: 2026-07-11
related: [formats/export-packages, formats/media-formats, formats/metadata-formats, protocols/oai-pmh]
features: []
---

# Data & Formats

A Preservated-hosted museum site publishes its public collection through a handful of well-defined, standards-based surfaces. This section covers what data is available and in which formats; [Protocols & APIs](/developers/en-US/protocols/oai-pmh) covers how to fetch it.

## What you can get

- **Bulk export packages** — an institution admin can generate a downloadable archive of collection metadata (and, optionally, original media files) and share it with you directly. See [Export Packages](/developers/en-US/formats/export-packages).
- **Media files** — the image, document, audio, and video formats a museum can bring into Preservated, and the web-delivery formats (thumbnails, deep-zoom tiles, page renditions, streaming proxies) generated from them. See [Media Formats](/developers/en-US/formats/media-formats).
- **Descriptive metadata standards** — Preservated emits records in several established metadata standards so aggregators, discovery services, and other collection-management systems can harvest and interpret them without custom mapping. See [Metadata Formats](/developers/en-US/formats/metadata-formats).

## How you get it

Metadata and linked-data surfaces are fetched over HTTP with no authentication required, since they only ever expose what a public visitor to the museum's site could already see:

- [OAI-PMH Harvesting](/developers/en-US/protocols/oai-pmh) — pull metadata records in bulk, incrementally, over time.
- [IIIF](/developers/en-US/protocols/iiif) — load zoomable images, audio/video, and multi-page documents in any IIIF-compatible viewer.
- [Linked Data (JSON-LD)](/developers/en-US/protocols/linked-data) — dereference a single public artifact as a CIDOC-CRM graph.

Bulk export packages, by contrast, are generated by an institution's own staff from their admin dashboard — there's no public endpoint to request one yourself. If you're integrating with a specific museum, ask your contact there to run an export and share the resulting files.

## What's not available yet

There's no general-purpose API for creating or updating records, searching programmatically, or managing an institution's site. See the [API Roadmap](/developers/en-US/protocols/api-roadmap) for what's planned.