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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 . Please do and be able to provide a better customer support. If abuse of these key is detected, Europeana Foundation may enforce limits to its usage or even block access to the Europeana APIs.

For this reason, we strongly recommend to not share these keys with third parties or expose it in user interfaces, code or in markup as the API keys are confidential and are for use by the client application or user invidual only.

Accessing the Europeana APIs

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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This option makes use of the wskey parameter instead of an header. This option was the preferred and only option until 2023 but is planned for deprecation in the coming years. The reason for this change has to do with the fact that the public key can very easily be leaked when URLs are shared or bookmarked by users.

Request

GET https://api.europeana.eu/...?wskey=[WSKEY]

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POST https://auth.europeana.eu/auth/realms/europeana/protocol/openid-connect/token
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

client_id:[CLIENT_ID]
client_secret:[CLIENT_SECRET]
username:[CLIENT_IDUSERNAME]
password:[CLIENT_SECRETPASSWORD]
grant_type:password

Requesting a token for user-level access (via authorization code flow)

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