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Discovery APIs

The Discovery APIs let you find a specific library or school collection, browse and search their OverDrive titles, show metadata about every title, and show whether titles are available to borrow.

This suite of APIs includes

  • Library Account API: Get information about a library or school account, such as their name, the formats they offer, and a link to browse and search their OverDrive collection.
  • Search API: View a subset of titles in a digital collection or search for a specific title.
  • Metadata API: Get details about a specific title, such as the author, series, subjects, and summary.
  • Library Availability API: See whether a specific title is available to be borrowed, and retrieve other circulation info, like the number of copies available and the number of holds.
  • Magazine Issues API: List all the available issues for a magazine, including the most recent issue and any available prior issues.
  • Digital Inventory API: Retrieve a list of all titles in a library or school's digital collection for cataloging purposes.

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.