The National Archives (UK) Discovery
Archival descriptions for United Kingdom. Access: Public API. Terms checked November 1, 2026.
Access and terms
| Slug | uk-national-archives-discovery |
|---|---|
| Records | Archival descriptions |
| Places | United Kingdom |
| Years | Not stated by the source |
| Access | Public API |
| Key | Not needed. |
| Rate limit | Guideline of no more than 3,000 API calls per day, at no more than one request per second. |
| robots.txt | Allows the path Lineage calls. |
| Homepage | discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ |
| API docs | www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/terms-and-conditions/discovery-for-developers-about-the-application-programming-interface-api/ |
| Terms | www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/terms-and-conditions/discovery-for-developers-about-the-application-programming-interface-api/ |
| Checked by hand | November 1, 2026 |
Notes
Offered as a beta. There is no key; access is granted by emailing webmaster@nationalarchives.gov.uk with the IP address requests will come from, so Lineage needs a fixed outbound IP before it can call it. Most catalogue data is Crown copyright under the Open Government Licence; images of records need separate permission. The API sandbox did not answer within 8 seconds on the day of review, so the health probe reads the developer page.
Evidence read on November 1, 2026
Status: Live
Live at the last check, 2026-11-01 22:02 UTC. HTTP 200 in 342 ms. One check a day.
JSON: /v1/sources/uk-national-archives-discovery. For agents: /sources/uk-national-archives-discovery/llms.txt.