Columbia University

Columbia Open Data Service

The central university service publishing data feeds to software developers in programming-friendly formats such as JSON and XML — the course directory, the CLIO library catalogue and building access among them — with documented refresh schedules, data diagrams and element documentation. It is the closest thing Columbia has to a developer portal, and access is affiliation-gated: any member of the University community may log in with their UNI to consume the feeds, and there is no external, partner or application tier for anyone else. On this run the service and its documentation were unreadable — the host sits behind a Cloudflare managed challenge that returns HTTP 403 to every non-browser client, including one presenting full browser headers. The access model described here is carried forward from the June 2026 profile and is not re-verified.

GitHub

Documentation

📖
Documentation
https://opendataservice.columbia.edu/about
📖
Authentication
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/columbia/refs/heads/main/authentication/columbia-authentication.yml

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API entry from apis.yml

apis.yml Raw ↑ 
aid: columbia:opendata
name: Columbia Open Data Service
description: 'The central university service publishing data feeds to software developers in programming-friendly
  formats such as JSON and XML — the course directory, the CLIO library catalogue and building access
  among them — with documented refresh schedules, data diagrams and element documentation. It is the closest
  thing Columbia has to a developer portal, and access is affiliation-gated: any member of the University
  community may log in with their UNI to consume the feeds, and there is no external, partner or application
  tier for anyone else. On this run the service and its documentation were unreadable — the host sits
  behind a Cloudflare managed challenge that returns HTTP 403 to every non-browser client, including one
  presenting full browser headers. The access model described here is carried forward from the June 2026
  profile and is not re-verified.'
humanURL: https://opendataservice.columbia.edu/
tags:
- Open Data
- Data Feeds
- JSON
- XML
- Gated
- Developer Portal
properties:
- type: Documentation
  url: https://opendataservice.columbia.edu/about
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/columbia-authentication.yml
x-operator: institution
x-operator-evidence: Host is under columbia.edu, the institution's own registrable domain.
x-access: affiliation_gated
x-status: 403 Cloudflare managed challenge, probed 2026-08-19