Founders Online API documentation

At this URL is an API that can be used to retrieve metadata and document content for documents contained in Founders Online, based on document identifiers. For example:

https://founders.archives.gov/API/docdata/Franklin/01-04-02-0091

Results are returned as a JSON document with the following keys:

title
The document title [string]
permalink
The permanent URL pointing to the document in Founders Online [URL string]
authors
An array of one or more authors [string]
recipients
An array of one or more recipients [string]
date-from
The starting date of the document [string in ISO date format]
date-to
The ending date of the document, identical to "date-from" for a document with a single precise date [string in ISO date format]
content
The textual content of the document, minus editorial content (such as endnotes) [string]

The document identifier applicable to the API can be derived from the document permalink; it is the substring following "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/" in the permalink.

Those wishing to query and retrieve data for any set of documents in Founders Online may wish to consult the metadata summary files found at https://founders.archives.gov/Metadata/, provided in JSON and XML. Those files can be used to generate a set of URLs of interest—for example, all documents by George Washington written in the 1770s. The URLs can then be passed to this API.

When automating download of a large set of documents, please set a reasonable delay time, such as maximum 10 requests/second. Excessive use of this service that overloads server resources may force us to curtail the service.

In order to filter out documents that are purely modern editorial content (introductions, editorial notes, etc.), you may wish to retrieve only documents that have a value for "date-from". All or nearly all primary documents in Founders Online are dated, but editorial documents are not.

Questions about this API or the underlying data can be addressed to foundersonline@nara.gov.