About The Exhibit Cost Record
The record of what exhibits and interactive media cost already exists in public. It has just never been assembled in one place, cited, and made searchable.
Why this exists
Museums, science centers, and cultural institutions planning an exhibit or interactive project routinely have to guess at cost without a citable public reference — and the figures that do circulate are often unsourced, undated, or silent about what's actually included in the number. Meanwhile, a real public record of what was actually spent already exists, scattered across federal procurement data, grant databases, state transparency portals, and tax filings. This project assembles that record into one place, with every figure traceable to its source.
Rules of the road
- Public sources only. Every row carries a
source_url. Nothing is estimated, interpolated, or reconstructed. - No firm's internal finances appear here. Every figure is a matter of public record before this project touched it.
- Descriptive, not price advice. This dataset reports what was awarded. It makes no commentary on any firm's pricing and isn't a substitute for a real estimate on your project.
- Sparse classes stay sparse. Where a category has few examples, it's published with its real count — never padded to look more complete.
- Scope bundling is flagged, never averaged away. See the methodology page.
Status
This is a pre-publication working dataset. A stratified classification QA pass has been completed on the federal awards file (see the methodology page for results and known gaps). Don't cite an individual row without checking it against its linked source.
License
Dataset and documentation released under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: “The Exhibit Cost Record.” The underlying government records are public domain; the compilation, classification, and documentation are what this license covers.
Who publishes this
The Exhibit Cost Record is published by Sitara Systems, a spatial human-computer interaction consultancy for museums and cultural institutions. Sitara appears in this dataset like any other firm where a public record names it — no row is treated differently because of who publishes the site.