Brown Digital Repository (BDR) API
The Brown University Library's public, keyless REST API over the Brown Digital Repository — an item API, a collection API, a Solr-backed search API, and a two-key link index at /api/. Live and unauthenticated on 2026-08-30 against an index of 1,147,400 public objects. Brown documents it itself, in prose, in the wiki of its own Brown-University-Library/bdr_api_documentation GitHub repository; there is no Brown-published OpenAPI, so the contract in this repo is derived and marked as such. Notable behaviours, all probed: rows is silently clamped to 500, malformed queries return 200 rather than the documented 400, unknown PIDs return a nine-byte text/html "Not Found" rather than the documented 403, no CORS headers are sent (JSONP via a callback parameter is the documented cross-origin path), and Cloudflare bot protection added in Spring 2025 fronts the host.
Brown Digital Repository (BDR) API is one of 7 APIs that Brown University publishes on the APIs.io network, described by a machine-readable OpenAPI specification.
This API exposes 1 JSON Schema definition.
Tagged areas include Digital Repository, Research Repository, Library, Search, and Research Data. The published artifact set on APIs.io includes an OpenAPI specification, API documentation, an API reference, authentication docs, and 1 JSON Schema.
This API exposes 5 operations across 5 paths, organized into 4 resource areas, and defines 9 schemas. It is described by OpenAPI 3.1.0, at version 2026-08-30.
Requests are made against a single base URL, https://repository.library.brown.edu.
Metadata
The identity and technical contract details declared by the specification.
Paths & Operations 5
Across 5 paths, the API surfaces 5 operations — 5 GET. They span 4 resource areas: Discovery, Search, Items, Collections. Each is listed below with its method, path, parameters, and response codes.
The API root link index.
Solr-backed search across public BDR objects.
Metadata for a single repository object, addressed by PID.
Repository collections and their membership.
Schemas 9
The contract defines 9 schemas that model the data the API accepts and returns. The most detailed are Relations (13 properties), Item (11 properties), CollectionRef (9 properties), Document (5 properties). Each schema is shown below with its type and property counts.
Specification
The full machine-readable OpenAPI contract behind this narrative.
Source
More from Brown University 6
Other APIs Brown University publishes across the network.
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