David Riordan   •   almost 10 years ago

NYPL APIs & Lots of Library Data

Hi everyone - stoked you want to use our data and API's.

1. Our catalog API is at http://developer.bibliocommons.com/. This is the API in front of our new catalog interface http://nypl.bibliocommons.com. It's usually only for library partners only, but Bibliocommons is opening it up for developers here today (and your key will stay active afterwards).
In order to be approved, you'll have to sign up by NOON ON SATURDAY and mention "hackathon" in the registration (even though it says you need a library email - which you won't need for today). It's also got a limit of 5,000 calls per key per day, so it's not ideal for scraping, but it's good for searching, structured records, structured lists, and making lending possible.

2. To use the RDA data from The Library Corporation check out: http://tlclabs.co/index.php/2013/05/the-publishing-hackathon-tlclabs-rda-metadata-integration-challenge/

3. Our classic catalog records are XML records. So if you go to any records at http://catalog.nypl.org/record=b14618472~S1, and change record= to xrecord=, you'll get the underlying book record.

4. For any big data stuff, the best bet is the OpenLibrary data feed or API. http://openlibrary.org/developers It's an amalgamation of book data from the Library of Congress and a bunch of other libraries. Couple million book records.

Find me if you have any questions.