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To start using the Europeana APIs you need to register for a key at the registration page. Upon registration, you will get your individual private and public authentication key. The private key (or secret) is used for specific methods that require additional user authentication while the public key must be used by all other API methods, see Access using an API key.
We use these keys to anonymously gather relevant statistics about the usage of the API so that we can better improve it and be able to provide a better customer support. Please do not share these keys with third parties or expose it in user interfaces or in markup as the API keys are confidential and are for use by the client or user only.
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With minor exceptions (namely the Thumbnail API and , OAI-PMH, SPARQL), when accessing the Europeana APIs, you need to provide your access key (corresponding to your public key) or token (issued by the Auth Service) as part of the request.
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If you only want to access public information then supplying an access key is sufficient, however, if you need to access private information or contribute data to the APIs, then a token is mandatory. The preferred option to supply an access key is using the “x-api-key” header but other options are also available. If you are accesing the Europeana APIs via a browser we recommend reading this guide.
“X-Api-Key” header (preferred)
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