Epexio - Public Data APIs

Search Service: Archival descriptions – record by record

Archival descriptions are arranged in a hierarchical organisation, this repository surfaces each level of the hierarchy as a distinct records.

Endpoint

The search service can be accessed with a simple HTTP GET to:

https://digital.epexio.com/uosViewer/repositories/records/search

API Parameters

Parameter Description Supported values
q The search query, this parameter is mandatory A word, text string, or expression with supported operators (see below)
field The field or group of fields to search over. If ommitted, defaults to *title* *title* (searches over titles), *description* (searches over descriptive metadata fields), *content* (searches over content fields such as text layers), *fulltext* (an alias for all field)
limit The number of results to return in a single page of results (defaults to 10) A numeric value between 1 and 500
offset An offset to start paging from (defaults to 0 - the first record in the result set) A numeric value greater than 0

Query expressions

A number of search operators are supported

Operators / Modifiers

Operator Description Example
AND Combine two expressions and require both to match
peter AND penguin
(match records containing the word "peter" and the word "penguin")
OR Combine two expressions and require either to match
peter OR penguin
(match records containing either the word "peter", or the word "penguin", or both)
+ or - Selectively indicate that terms be included or excluded
+sailing +ship -ocean
(match records containing the word "sailing" and the word "ship", but not the word "ocean")
~ Apply a proximity search
"sailing ship"~10"
(match records containing the word "sailing" and the word "ship" within 10 words of each other)

Example requests

Responses

Results will be returned in a JSON list with each result containing a number of identifiers.

{
  "header": {
    "hitCount": 6
  },
  "records": [
    {
      "uri": "http://data.epexio.com/uosViewer/descriptions/3583ac6d-5727-405b-aec8-a6b04ced5750",
      "digitisation": "http://data.epexio.com/uosViewer/digitisations/f3c6f5b1-f9c9-4851-853c-78fefe32c174",
      "oai_identifier": "oai:data.epexio.com:uosViewer/descriptions/60794e1e-ae17-436e-80ef-1514444d7154"
      "title": "A study of transport workers",
      ...
    }
    ...
  ]
}
   

uri can be resolved to a JSON representations of the record and digitisation can be resolved to a JSON document containing links to digital material. This search is also paired with an OAI-PMH repository which will accept the identifiers provided in the oai_identifier

In order to get additional metadata about a record, it's recommended to use the various OAI APIs. For activities that require interacting with digital images and transcripts, resolving digitisations resources will be more productive.