How to search Europeana website and API

Owned by Adina Ciocoiu
Last updated: Jun 29, 2023 by Henning Scholz
2 min read

Introduction

Searching for specific metadata records or datasets across the Europeana website and all our APIs may not always be fully self explanatory. For the Europeana website, there is a dedicated page that explains how to search on the http://europeana.eu . The full API documentation also explaining and listing all the possible search terms is available on Europeana Pro. But for some specific cases it is handy to have a few shortcuts, some specific queries to help solving a specific problem. In addition, we would like to also help you to search across our production website and APIs in the same way as on our preview website and APIs. This is what this page is aiming to achieve.

The API queries examples shared below use the api2demo key. For your own personal use of the API we encourage you have your own API key. To get this, apply here.

Production vs preview

Europeana.eu is the website you are familar with, which is where everything that is published will be visible. But we also have a preview environment, where everything will be before its published. You can work with this preview environment in the same way as with the production environment, but it is not really public as it is also not indexed by Google. Here you also find datasets that are depublished (e.g. because of broken links). This is also the staging environement we use to pause for feedback, before publishing the datasets. Same as for the websites, also APIs are available for production and preview. When using the production search APIs, it always starts with https://api.europeana.eu/record/v2/search.json?, while for preview it starts with https://metis-preview-api-prod.eanadev.org/api/v2/search.json?. In both environements, searching works in the exact same way.

Searching on europeana.eu

When searching on the Europeana website, the URL always starts with https://www.europeana.eu/en/search?, followed by the actual query, e.g. query=who%3AVermeer. Looking for everything from Vermeer will then lead to this URL: https://www.europeana.eu/en/search?query=who%3AVermeer&view=grid. With this in mind, more search queries can be developed and also search queries on our preview environment can be developed. The corresponding URL in Europeana preview is https://metis-preview-portal.eanadev.org/en/search?query=who%3AVermeer&view=grid .

Below we list a few more queries that you asked us about in the past:

 

API search

When searching on the Europeana search API, the URL always starts with https://api.europeana.eu/record/v2/search.json?, followed by the actual query, e.g. query=PROVIDER:"CulturaItalia"&profile=facets&facet=contentTier&facet=metadataTier&rows=0&wskey=api2demo. Examples for full queries that are also coming from questions you asked in the past are listed below:

 

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