How we verify
Every exhibition here carries two things: dates checked against the museum’s own announcement, and a link to the page where you can check them yourself.
That should be the floor for a listings site. It mostly isn’t.
Where listings come from
A scanner reads the what’s-on pages of the museums we track, every morning, and files what it finds into a queue. Nothing moves from that queue to this site without a person opening the museum’s own page and agreeing it says what the scanner thinks it says.
The machine finds things. It doesn’t publish them.
What we won’t publish
A show with no closing date stays unpublished. “Opens in March, dates to be confirmed” is an announcement, not a listing.
A show whose dates we can’t confirm from the museum appears here, but carries no structured data — so it won’t be repeated back to you by a search engine or an AI assistant as though it were settled. We would rather be quiet than be quoted wrongly.
A source page that doesn’t support the claim gets nothing at all.
“Last verified” means we checked
Each listing carries a last-verified date. It moves when a scan re-reads that museum’s own page and finds the show still there, with the same dates. It is not the day someone typed the record — it is the last time the museum’s page agreed with us.
Only a source belonging to the museum can refresh that date. An aggregator repeating the Louvre’s programme cannot verify the Louvre.
The venue is the building you walk into
Museums stage exhibitions in other people’s buildings, and a press release carries the organiser’s name rather than the address. While the Centre Pompidou is closed for renovation it is presenting work at the Grand Palais and at the Bibliothèque nationale de France — so those shows are listed at the Grand Palais and the BnF, with the Pompidou credited as organiser.
Travel to the name on the press release and you will be at the wrong door.
A touring show is one exhibition, not several
When an exhibition moves from London to Fort Worth it stays a single record, with a run at each venue and each venue’s own dates. That is most of the reason this site exists: so you can see a show coming before it arrives.
The pictures are ours to show you
Every photograph here is one we have licensed or that is free to use, with its source and licence on the record. The full ledger is public. Where no honest image exists — and for some buildings none does, because the law where they stand does not permit one — you will see our compass mark rather than a stock photograph standing in for the real thing.
When we’re wrong
Tell us: hello@museumcompass.com. Dates move, shows get pulled, and museums do not always update their own pages. A correction with a link to the museum’s page is the fastest way to get it fixed.