Internet Archive is well-known for our interactive user services. These include the Wayback Machine, the archive.org website, and OpenLibrary. Less well known are the programmatic, or API (Application Program Interface) tools that can allow users and computer programs to access archived information “at scale.”

Our APIs evolved over time, adapting to address specific projects and expanding as we introduced new services and capabilities into our operations. Although not entirely uniform, these APIS were created to encourage developers to add media to archive.org as well as to consume and repurpose metadata and media.

“Items” are the organizational units of Internet Archive. Our primary APIs interact with items to perform fundamental actions:

Write and read metadata to and from Items

Write and read media or other files to and from Items

We have recently introduced two new capabilities:

Report the interaction and activity that an item has experienced

Discover what changes have happened to Internet Archive content

Documentation and examples to use our most important APIs have now been organized at a single location. We invite our community to review and use this documentation to make use of the information and content in the Internet Archive.