The Brooklyn Museum has an API and it's pretty rad. This is a collection of sample applications which use it for various purposes. Right not this just includes a search engine built for finding stuff in the museum collection like a PRO.
You'll need an OpenCollection API and you can apply for one here: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/api/register/. Once you've been issued an API key, you'll want to set it as a shell variable named OPENCOLLECTION_API_KEY for the user your server runs as. The search example is built on HTML5, PHP, and jQuery. You'll need a web server of some kind and a web browser with internets.
This page is distributed under the MIT license. Please see the included copy of the license for deets.