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Brown Digital Repository APIs

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.

Item API

Returns data about the object, such as primary_title and object_type.

If the object id is not found, or it is a private object, a 403 Forbidden response will be returned.

Collection API

Note: collection-api calls that return items return urls to both the web-view and the item-api view.

Search API

Note that although over 100 results are found, only 25 are returned

The search query should be formatted the same way as standard Solr queries

Solr query documentation

If the query is badly formatted, a ‘400 / Bad Request’ response will be returned.

If the search is successful (even if there are no results), a ‘200 / OK’ response will be returned.