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Circulation APIs

The Circulation APIs let you retrieve user information, check out titles, download borrowed titles, and place holds.

To get access to the Circulation APIs, your API implementation must be able to authenticate users. That is, you'll need to have access to your users' OverDrive credentials (such as a library card number or user ID) and authenticate them via the OverDrive APIs.

This suite of APIs includes

  • Patron Information API: Get information about a specific user, such as their lending period preferences for each format and their checkout limit.
  • Checkouts API: See a user's current loans, borrow a title, select a format to download, open a borrowed title, and return a title before the end of the lending period.
  • Holds API: Place holds on unavailable titles, edit holds, and remove holds.

Best practices

Build flexibility into your integration:

  • Don’t rely on every field being present in each API response. Many fields are nullable and may not be included in API responses.
  • Fields can be added to responses at any time, so make sure your integration can handle unexpected fields.