Introduction

The UNT Digital Library provides public access to number of application programming interfaces (APIs) to the collections within the system. Below are examples of APIs avaliable for Federal Communications Commission Record that can be used openly by those interested in programatically accessing data from this system. You do not need to apply for a special key to use these APIs.

For additional information about these APIs or if you have general questions about machine interaction with the UNT Digital Library please contact Mark Phillips.

Note that all example URLs below use the same protocol and server name, http://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/FCCRD/. We only show the URL paths and parameters below to save space.

The API

OAI-PMH

The Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) allows programmatic access to this collection's metadata. Two metadata formats are currently supported, the standard oai_dc and the UNT Libraries native metadata format untl.

Below are example URLs which demonstrate some of the standard views of this OAI-PMH repository:

• oai/
  base URL for OAI-PMH repository
• oai/?verb=Identify
  Display information about this repository
• oai/?verb=ListMetadataFormats
  List avaliable metadata formats
• oai/?verb=ListSets
  List avaliabe sets
• oai/?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
  Display records in the oai_dc metadata format
• oai/?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=untl
  Display records in the untl metadata format

SRU

Search/Retrieval via URL (SRU) can be used to run advanced queries on the content of this collection. A human-readable stylesheet has been added to help demonstrate searches via SRU. You can see this interface at the following URL.

• sru/

OpenSearch

OpenSearch is a search protocol which enables simple full-text searches to be performed on this collection's content. The availibility of this protocol is advertised in a LINK header element of the site's HTML template as "Search Federal Communications Commission Record," using this OpenSearch Description document.

A human-readable stylesheet has been added to help demonstrate searches via OpenSearch. You can see this interface at the following url.

• opensearch/

Thumbnails

Each item in this collection has a convenient way of obtaining the thumbnail image. This is accomplished by appending /thumbnail/ to the end of an objects ARK URL. For example:

• http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth12412/thumbnail/

The response will be application/jpeg containing a thumbnail for the item requested.

Identifiers

A convenient way to obtain a list of all identifers for a given Federal Communications Commission Record is avaliable by appending /identifiers/ to the base of the collection URL.

• identifiers/

The response will be application/txt containing one ARK identifier per line.