Our APIs
Public APIs
Our public APIs (Application Programming Interface) provide structured, machine-readable access to the data behind our digital collections. Whether you’re building an app, conducting computational research, or integrating library data into your own tools, these APIs are designed to support flexible, scalable use of our resources.
Search API
This API can be accessed using HTTP GET. The query values can be limited to one or more of “title”, “description” (all descriptive metadata fields) and “content” (transcript or OCR). By default, queries are limited to “title”. The search API also supports operators such as AND OR and modifiers that exclude or include terms. Results are returned as brief records in JSON. Each record contains keys and values. Users may be particularly interested in the values for the “uri” key, which provides a link to a more detailed record.
View the documentation or explore our example Jupyter Notebook.
Record API
This API can be accessed using HTTP GET. The endpoint takes a record reference number and returns the record in JSON. For example:
https://api.epexio.com/catalogues/uosViewer/public/descriptions?refNo=ao-hartley1746430-2001
Record reference numbers (refNo) can be found in Search API results and OAI-PMH results. You can view our example Jupyter Notebook.
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
This API implements OAI-PMH and can be used to obtain a list of summary records expressed in Dublin Core in XML.
Download summary records with a tool that supports OAI-PMH or follow our example Jupyter Notebook.
Protected API
The Digital Library Protected API provides access to text and images for records, where they exist. To use the protected API you must request a key from us using the API key request form. The form asks for your name, email address and a description of your research. The form also contains the terms of use for the API, which you must agree to before we provide you with a user, key and secret. The user, key and secret are used to request a time-limited authentication token, which you include with your API calls.
The Digital Scholarship team will consider API key requests and will respond to successful requests by email, with the key and an example Jupyter Notebook demonstrating authentication.