Library of Congress: manuscripts, prints and photographs (loc.gov API)
Digitized records, Cultural heritage items for United States. Access: Public API. Terms checked November 2, 2026.
Access and terms
| Slug | loc-gov |
|---|---|
| Records | Digitized records, Cultural heritage items |
| Places | United States |
| Years | Not stated by the source |
| Access | Public API |
| Key | Not needed. |
| Rate limit | loc.gov JSON/YAML API: 20 requests per minute, with a 1 hour block if exceeded; the legal page asks for no more than 10 a minute in total, and robots.txt sets a crawl delay of 5 seconds. Shared with loc-chronicling-america. |
| robots.txt | Allows the path Lineage calls. |
| Homepage | www.loc.gov/ |
| API docs | www.loc.gov/apis/json-and-yaml/ |
| Terms | www.loc.gov/legal/ |
| Checked by hand | November 2, 2026 |
Notes
The same loc.gov JSON API as Chronicling America, on the manuscripts and prints and photographs formats: letters, orders, maps and prints of the war. robots.txt disallows /search and /pictures/search for crawlers; Lineage reads the API with fo=json, never those pages. Each item carries its own rights advisory: an image is used only with its rights statement recorded, and is captioned as context, never as a portrait of the person researched.
Evidence read on November 2, 2026
Status: Live
Live at the last check, 2026-11-03 03:49 UTC. HTTP 200 in 38 ms. One check a day.
JSON: /v1/sources/loc-gov. For agents: /sources/loc-gov/llms.txt.