US National Archives Catalog
Archival descriptions, Digitized records for United States. Access: Public API, key needed. Terms checked November 1, 2026.
Access and terms
| Slug | us-national-archives |
|---|---|
| Records | Archival descriptions, Digitized records |
| Places | United States |
| Years | Not stated by the source |
| Access | Public API |
| Key | Needed. The server reads NARA_API_KEY, which is not set yet. |
| Rate limit | Default 10,000 queries per month per API key. A key that goes over is blocked until the first of the next month. Higher limits are granted case by case. |
| robots.txt | Disallows the path for crawlers. See the notes. |
| Homepage | catalog.archives.gov/ |
| API docs | www.archives.gov/research/catalog/help/api |
| Terms | www.archives.gov/research/catalog/help/api |
| Checked by hand | November 1, 2026 |
Notes
Catalog API v2 returns archival descriptions, authority records, digital object metadata and extracted OCR text as JSON. Every request needs a key. The terms say not to scrape the API or download the whole catalog through it (use the AWS Open Data copy instead), not to cache or store returned content, and to show a notice that NARA does not endorse the service. robots.txt on catalog.archives.gov disallows every path for all agents, so the health probe reads the API page on www.archives.gov instead. On the day of review that page answered curl but returned 502 to the probe, so the status may read down while the API itself is fine.
Evidence read on November 1, 2026
Status: Down
Down at the last check, 2026-11-01 22:02 UTC. HTTP 502 in 521 ms. Server error (502). One check a day.
JSON: /v1/sources/us-national-archives. For agents: /sources/us-national-archives/llms.txt.