Swedish National Heritage Board K-samsök (SOCH) Open Cultural Heritage API Riksantikvarieämbetet

Overview

K-samsök (Swedish Open Cultural Heritage, SOCH) is a national open data aggregator and web service for Swedish cultural heritage, developed and maintained by the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet, RAÄ). It harvests metadata from the databases of cultural heritage institutions across Sweden, indexes and links the data, and makes it publicly accessible via an open web API.

History and Founding

The Swedish National Heritage Board received the mandate to develop SOCH from the Swedish government in 2008 and has operated it ever since. The Swedish National Heritage Board itself was founded in 1630 under King Gustavus Adolphus, making it one of the oldest government agencies in Sweden. Its current Director General is Susanne Thedéen, who assumed the role in October 2024.

Collections and Holdings

The K-samsök platform aggregates metadata from approximately 40 to 45 cultural heritage institutions, including national museums, municipal archives, and local non-profit organisations. The total content exceeds 10 million cultural objects, encompassing artefacts, art works, biological samples, historical buildings, ancient manuscripts, film recordings, archaeological sites, and historic environment records. Notable datasets include over 2.1 million artefacts, 880,000 photographs, 830,000 monuments, 440,000 documents, 110,000 historic buildings, 1,500 historic maps, and records of 40,000 historical persons.

Access and Services

K-samsök provides a free, open API that any Swedish institution with a digitalised collection can use to contribute and consume data. The full content can be explored via the search interface Kringla. K-samsök also serves as Sweden's national aggregator delivering data to the Europeana platform, currently contributing over 2.4 million records from approximately 45 institutions to Europeana.