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The Brown Digital Repository is pleased to offer a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to access content within the BDR.
For an introduction to APIs we recommend the introduction provided by the Digital Public Library of America.
These APIs all return JSON-formatted data about public collections and items in the BDR.
In the case of an exception during the request processing, a "500 / Internal Server Error" response will be returned to the client.
All APIs accept a callback parameter for ajax requests.
In Spring 2025 we added features from Cloudflare to protect against bot traffic. This may affect users of the API, particularly if you are requesting a large volume of items at a high rate. If you experience issues with the API that you believe are related to these changes, please reach out to us by creating an issue.
If you're a Brown community-member, you can minimize being impacted by these changes by connecting to the Brown network via VPN.