The Europeana OAI-PMH service offers a way to collect large amounts of Europeana data from our repository through a protocol named OAI-PMH which stands for Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The OAI-PMH protocol (presently in v2.0) allows you to harvest the entirety, or a selection, of all Europeana metadata so that it can be integrated into other services or applications.

Before start using this API, we recommend reading the introduction page for more information on how data is structured into Records and Datasets, Registering for an API key, and reading the Terms of Use. If you want to get started with this API, go directly to the Getting Started section or try it out directly on the Console.

You can learn more about the harvesting protocol on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) website and also by reading the OAI for beginners tutorial from the Open Archives Forum.

Known limitation

Europeana currently doesn't maintain a deleted record registry, which leads to a recommendation to re-harvest the entire collection at least every six months to ensure your copy or archive of the Europeana repository is up to date.

Discussion

Join the Europeana API discussion group at Google Groups and get regular updates about the Europeana API, provide feedback and discuss it with other developers.

Roadmap and Changelog

The current version of the OAI-PMH service is Beta.

Credits

The Europeana OAI-PMH Server and Client was created by Ontotext in the frame of the Europeana Creative project.

This API can be used to harvest metadata records from Europeana. Metadata records can be harvested all at once (all of Europeana's metadata), or selectively per dataset or date of creation/modification. Further down this page you will find some information on the structure and definitions of the repository.

Available requests

Below you can find the available requests. The base URL for all requests is http://oai.europeana.eu/. These links and requests return XML, for which you need to use an XML-aware browser or viewing application.

Here is the list of available requests defined by the OAI-PMH protocol:

• Identify
• getRecord
• listIdentifiers (Resumption)
• listMetadataFormats

Structure and Format of the Data

The records in the OAI-PMH service are grouped into Datasets and are available as EDM RDF/XML. An example of a dataset that is accepted by the OAI-PMH service is 2022608_Ag_NO_ELocal_DiMu. The records are identified by their URIs. An example of such an identifier is http://data.europeana.eu/item/2022608/AAK_AAKS_2007_02_0206. To learn more about data.europeana.eu and its resources please see the EDM definitions at the introduction page.

Access key

To use this API you need to supply an API key using Basic HTTP authentication. While in Beta, the API is restricted and can only be accessed on request. If you wish to start using it, please send an email to api@europeana.eu to request an access key for this service. Please note that this key is not the same as the API key for the Europeana REST APIs and therefore will not give you access to it.

You can try out the OAI-PMH Service and its protocol via the web interface. Note that you do need an access key at this point.