Opening up cultural heritage data
The National French Library provides API-access to its data
On 23 November 2017, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) published a set of APIs (application programming interface) via which the data of the French National Library can now be more easily accessed. The APIs allow users to query and retrieve catalogue metadata from the BnF main catalogue, from the portal data.bnf.fr and from the digital library Gallica. Furthermore, the APIs also allow access to the digitised collections of the French National Library.
The BnF provides several sets of data: bibliographical metadata, descriptive metadata of digital documents, reference ontologies and authority files, digital documents etc. For each API or dataset, the interested users will find an overview of the content, technical documentation, details of the rights of use and access to the data. Several formats and technologies thus make it possible to respond to the diversity of uses of library data: catalogue feeding, creation of new innovative services, data mining, data visualisation, etc. Furthermore, in order to facilitate access to and re-use of the available data, datasets (images and text, metadata, statistics) are directly downloadable.
The BnF cordially invites interested developers, researchers and culture lovers to make use of the data of the National Library and develop interesting applications in the cultural field.
More information on the APIs can be found on the BnF website (in French). Have a look and explore the potential of cultural heritage data yourself!