November Updates

Partners

Following are the improvements we've made in November to the OverDrive APIs:

• In an effort to standardize our date formats, publishDate is now a string (no longer a dateTime) in an ISO 8601 date format (formatted as “YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD”). We sometimes receive dates from publishers as strings (e.g., "Spring 2014) and need to accommodate those values while trying to standardize a format for actual dateTime values.
• We've added new "Educational Metadata" for ATOS and Grade-Level designations to the Metadata API.
• We've upgraded our search & metadata services to be more robust. This update will change the collection tokens for all libraries. However, if you've saved collection tokens in your application or instances, the change will be transparent to your application because we'll map the old collection tokens to the new collection tokens for you. Best practice suggestion: Refresh all your collection tokens regularly to ensure you're using the most current and accurate tokens for the collections you're searching.
• To accommodate a more general application of the Patron API, we've changed the official name of the ilsname parameter in the Patron Authentication API to authorizationName. For existing integrations, the Patron API will still accept ilsname in the header, but all documentation and responses will begin to refer to the value as authorizationName.
• The Search and Metadata APIs will now accept item IDs (CRID) encased with braces ({ }) as they often appear in MARC records of OverDrive Digital Media assets.
• The Metadata API now uses an isOwnedByCollection field to communicate if a particular item is present in the requested collection or not. This will allow for discovery of other items from a library that have not yet been purchased for the collection (e.g., Recommend-to-Library sets).
• We've corrected errors in the linkTemplates block of the response from the Checkouts API.
• When we see a new patron for the first time (i.e., a request to authenticate a new patron), we're now updating the patronID in /patron/me endpoint.
• We've corrected an error on bundled children metadata links which were returning 404s from the Metadata API page.
• We've trapped and codified an error when an invalid collection token is used in the Search API.
• We've trapped and handled an HTTP 500 exception in the Search API when requesting an offset value outside the bounds of the array.

-The OverDrive API Team