Overview

The Brown Digital Repository is most known for its website. But it also has an API.

An API ("Application Programming Interface") can be thought of as a protocol, or a structured way of communicating information. If you go to the BDR to perform a search, the webapp queries the BDR-API on that search-term. The API then returns structured data to the webapp, which uses that data to display the web-page of results you see.

The BDR API enables people to create their own web-pages or scripts that can access BDR data.

The BDR has a page showing a few examples of using the API; this wiki will document more examples, and the jupyter-notebook (experimental) file will enable folk who are familiar with using notebooks to try out the API interactively.

JSON note...

All of the data returned by the APIs is in JSON format -- basically a series of key-value pairs. Though JSON is generally used by computers, you can see from that linked wikipedia page that it can be nicely human-readable. However our API currently only returns JSON as one long string, so it's essential for your experimenting that you install a browser plug-in/extension that will automatically format the JSON so that it's comprehensible.

Note that different JSON plug-ins have different defaults. Some might sort the JSON key-value pairs, and some may not, so your results accessing these APIs may appear a bit different -- but the essential data will be the same.

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