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Agents tracked: 444 Releases (7d): 644 Agent status: 4 with issuesSince last limit reset: Claude 30d · Codex 3d Updated Oct 23, 2026
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Books and libraries · by Europeana Foundation

Europeana

A single search portal and set of APIs over records from European museums, libraries and archives, with CC0 metadata and per-item rights labels for the linked images, texts, audio and video.

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

Open europeana.eu ↗ agent.md

For your project

Official API
Official API Fair-use policy: a reasonable number of concurrent requests with waits between calls; Personal keys have lower limits than Project keys (one Personal key per account).
Key
Needed
Formats
JSON, IIIF, XML
Data download
Yes xml
“If your interest is to access metadata for a large amount of items, we recommend looking into our dataset download via FTP/HTTP or OAI-PMH offers .” europeana.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EF/pages/2704146433
License
Metadata: CC0 1.0; media: per-item rights statements CC0 covers all metadata; images and media follow the rights badge on each item (filter with reusability=open)
Commercial use
Commercial use with conditions
“The Digital Objects that are shown on Europeana.eu can only be used in accordance with the rights information displayed alongside them (the badges underneath the Digital Objects). They may also be used to the extent permitted by applicable copyright laws.” europeana.eu/en/rights/terms-of-use
Credit
Credit depends on the item
“If you re-use data published by Europeana, we encourage you to follow the Usage Guidelines for Metadata and to provide attribution to the data sources whenever possible.” europeana.eu/en/rights/terms-of-use
Embedding
Embedding with conditions
“the User shall assume that these Thumbnails and Content may only be used in accordance with the applicable copyright laws, unless the website of the data provider gives different permissions relating to the Thumbnails and/or Content, or uses such as embedding or linking are permitted.” europeana.eu/en/rights/terms-of-use
Using the website
Free

Read on Europeana's own pages on Oct 23, 2026 · license or terms · API docs. Check the license page before you ship.

For your agent

A request your code or agent can make (add your key):

https://api.europeana.eu/record/v2/search.json?wskey=api2demo&query=vermeer&reusability=open&rows=12
  • Pass reusability=open to get only freely reusable items, and always read edm:rights on each record before showing or reusing media; the API supports CORS.
  • Metadata is CC0, but each image or file follows its own rights statement (edm:rights); check it before reuse.
  • Personal keys are for non-production use only; production apps need a Project key, and keys must not be exposed in public code or UIs.
  • Keep concurrent requests low and use the bulk dataset downloads for large harvests.

Paste into your agent: Read https://agentgid.com/resources/europeana/agent.md before using Europeana.

What you can build

  • A public-domain art and photo picker filtered by country, century or subject
  • A historical newspaper search over the Newspapers API full text
  • A map of cultural objects by place using CC0 metadata from the Search API

More in Books and libraries

All 7 →

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 Digital Public Library of America 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 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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