---
layout: post
title: The Historic Newspaper API From The Library Of Congress
image: >-
  http://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/api-evangelist-site/blog/About_the_Site_and_API_«_Chronicling_America_«_Library_of_Congress.png
atomdate: 2016-08-18T22:00:00.000Z
tags:
  - News
---
It always bums me out that the cool kid startup APIs always get the lion share of the attention when it comes to APIs in the tech news. Which I guess makes it my responsibility to show the ACTUAL cool kid APIs, like [the Chronicling America API from The Library of Congress](http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/api/), which provides access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages.

The Library of Congress provides APIs for [searching](http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/api/#search) the newspaper directory and digitized page contents using [OpenSearch](http://www.opensearch.org/Home), [auto suggesting](http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/api/#autosuggest) of newspaper titles, [links](http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/api/#link) using a stable URL pattern, and [JSON](http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/api/#linked-data) views of all newspaper resources. They also provide [linked data](http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/api/#linked-data) allowing you to process and analyze newspaper information with "conceptual precision" (oooooh I like that), as well as [bulk data](http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/api/#bulk-data) for your deeper research needs.

I wish that ALL newspapers had APIs like the [New York Times](https://developer.nytimes.com/) and [The Guardian](http://open-platform.theguardian.com/) do, and information was available to the public by default, and that everything was automatically synced to any archive or collection that was interested in it, like the Libary of Congress. I know that newspapers are having a hard time in the digital age, and I can't help but feel that APIs would help them evolve, and shift until they find their voice in the digital age.