On the 28th of February Europeana published its API, compatible with the OpenSearch standard. With such API external applications and Internet services can search in the information aggregated in Europeana and use such search results outside of it. Work on the Europeana API was carried out for the last few months, and in the second half of 2010, after the Europeana Open Culture conference, The Europeana Foundation began cooperation with institutions interested in testing the API and in the development of pilot applications. Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center was one of such institutions.
As a part of the Europeana API pilot program, PSNC developed two components:
- On the website of the Digital Libraries Federation the search results were extended with data coming from Europeana (e.g.: “Chopin” query).
- On the website of the Digital Library of Wielkopolska pages with metadata of particular publications were extended with the list of similar publications from Europeana and the Federation (e.g. this PhD thesis).
More information about the Europeana API can be found on the Europeana website. Besides technical information there is also a gallery of applications using the API. Information about components developed by PSNC is also there.
We encourage all interested in the use of the Europeana OpenSearch API to give it a try and recommend the post in which we describe our experiences with it. We would also like to remind you, that the Digital Libraries Federation also has a similar interface. It is publicly available and its documentation is published on the DLF website.