Books and libraries · by Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)

Digital Public Library of America

A national portal that gathers catalog records for photos, books, maps, recordings and documents held by US libraries, archives and museums, with a JSON API that needs a key.

It stitches together small local archives and big institutions, so one search can surface a town historical society's photos next to national collections.

License unclear

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For your project

Official API: API unclear
Formats: JSON
Data download: Not stated
License: unclear (DPLA policies page could not be read) Not confirmed; linked items are held by contributing institutions and carry their own rights
Commercial use: Commercial use unclear
Credit: Not stated
Embedding: Embedding unclear
Using the website: Free

Read on Digital Public Library of America's own pages on Oct 23, 2026 · license or terms · API docs. Check the license page before you ship.

For your agent

No official API. An agent should not scrape the site: use it by hand.

Every /v2/items request needs an api_key parameter; read each record's own rights field before reusing linked media.
Pass api_key on every request and keep the key private.
Link to and credit the holding institution; check each item's rights before reusing media.

Paste into your agent: Read https://agentgid.com/resources/dpla/agent.md before using Digital Public Library of America.

What you can build

A local-history explorer that pulls records for one state or county
A topic finder that lists digitized items across US archives with links back to the holding institution

More in Books and libraries

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Project Gutenberg It is one of the largest clean, proofread corpora of classic literature, and the whole catalog and text set can be downloaded in bulk. API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions Open Library Almost every page has a machine-readable twin: add .json to a work or author URL and you get the structured record behind it. API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions Internet Archive Behind every item is a folder of original files and metadata you can fetch directly, from old radio shows to scanned books and forgotten home movies. API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions Library of Congress Any search page on loc.gov can be turned into structured data, so whole collections of historic photos or maps become something you can query and plot. API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions Europeana One query can pull paintings, manuscripts, newspapers and sound recordings from institutions all over Europe, filtered to items that are free to reuse. APIDownloadCommercial: conditions archive.today It keeps frozen, script-free copies of pages that later change or vanish, so you can see what a page said on a given day. License unclear

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