# Chronicling America

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/chroniclingamerica/  
**Website:** https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov  
**APIs profiled:** 6

Chronicling America is a Library of Congress initiative providing free public access to a searchable database of historic American newspaper pages from 1770 to 1963. The platform hosts over 20 million digitized newspaper pages from hundreds of US newspapers contributed by institutions in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). The API exposes search, title, issue, batch, and OCR text endpoints with no authentication required, returning responses in JSON and Atom feed formats.

## Kin Score — 42.3 / 100 (developing)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 42.3).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 74.1 |
| Contract Quality | 58.1 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 36.8 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 9.5 |
| Commercial Clarity | 50.0 |
| Access Clarity | 50.0 |

Regulatory layer — **Government & Public Sector**: 46.3 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 31.6 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | na |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | na |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | verified |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | na |

## Access

Free · Open access — onboarding: open, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: medium).

## APIs (6)

- **Chronicling America Batches API** — Endpoints for retrieving digitization batch information.
- **Chronicling America Issues API** — Endpoints for retrieving newspaper issue metadata.
- **Chronicling America OCR API** — Endpoints for retrieving OCR text from digitized newspaper pages.
- **Chronicling America Pages API** — Endpoints for retrieving individual newspaper page metadata and content.
- **Chronicling America Search API** — Full-text search endpoints for newspaper pages and titles.
- **Chronicling America Titles API** — Endpoints for retrieving newspaper title bibliographic metadata.

## Agentic access (1)

- **Chroniclingamerica Agentic Access** — 11 operations

## Security (2)

- **Chroniclingamerica Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · DNSSEC · DMARC
- **Chroniclingamerica Vulnerability Disclosure** — security.txt · contact published

## Plans (1)

- **Chroniclingamerica Plans Pricing**

## Tags

Newspapers, Historical, Archives, Library of Congress, Government, Digitized, OCR, Search, Cultural Heritage

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/chroniclingamerica/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.