# Columbia University **Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/columbia/ **Website:** https://www.columbia.edu/ **APIs profiled:** 10 Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City, ranked seventeenth in the QS World University Rankings. Its programmable footprint is small, real, and almost entirely invisible from the outside. Columbia operates exactly one publicly consumable, unauthenticated API of its own: the Columbia University Libraries Hours API at hours.library.columbia.edu, two read operations returning JSON with CORS enabled, built on Columbia's own openly published Rails codebase and documented by nobody. Alongside it the university runs a production Shibboleth Identity Provider that publishes signed SAML 2.0 metadata under the InCommon entityID urn:mace:incommon:columbia.edu, mints DOIs under its own DataCite prefix 10.7916 across 1.1 million registered identifiers, deposits into Crossref as member 6984, and releases the entire CLIO library catalogue as CC0 MARCXML bulk extracts. That is the whole of it. The Open Data Service that Columbia describes as its developer-facing service is gated behind a UNI login, and the IRI/LDEO Climate Data Library now redirects its data paths to a login form. Columbia publishes no OpenAPI, no developer portal reachable without affiliation, no changelog, no llms.txt and no API terms, and it reserves the hostname api.library.columbia.edu while serving nothing but a placeholder there. Most consequentially for machine access, Columbia defends its estate with two different anti-bot products: a Cloudflare managed challenge across the central web estate, and an Anubis proof-of-work challenge in front of the Libraries' entire discovery layer — the CLIO catalogue, Academic Commons and GeoData — which returns HTTP 200 with a bot-check body and made the institution's OAI-PMH endpoint unverifiable. Learning management runs on Instructure's Canvas and the research data platform on Redivis; both are tenant relationships, recorded as such and scored against their vendors. ## Kin Score — 40.9 / 100 (developing) Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: rising (+17.5 from 23.4). | Facet | Score | |---|---| | Discoverability | 64.8 | | Contract Quality | 68.5 | | Governance | 3.8 | | Contract Governance | 3.8 | | Operational Transparency | 26.3 | | Developer Ergonomics | 21.4 | | Commercial Clarity | 28.9 | | Access Clarity | 28.9 | Regulatory layer — **Education & Research**: 50.0 (matched via tags). ## Agent readiness — 48.3 (agent-ready) | Dimension | Value | |---|---| | Spec Presence | yes | | Agentic Access | yes | | Reversibility Documented | no | | MCP Server | no | | Auth Clarity | yes | | Idempotency | no | | Error Semantics | verified | | 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 | no | ## Access Partly open, mostly affiliation-gated — onboarding: unknown, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: high). ## APIs (10) - **Columbia University Libraries Hours API** — The only institution-operated, publicly consumable, unauthenticated API found anywhere in Columbia University's estate. Two read operations: which library locations are open rig... - **Columbia Identity — Shibboleth IdP and CAS** — Columbia University Information Technology operates the university's own identity infrastructure: a production Shibboleth Identity Provider publishing signed SAML 2.0 metadata a... - **CLIO Library Catalog Open Data** — Columbia University Libraries publishes its full catalogue — bibliographic and holdings records from the integrated library system behind CLIO — as gzipped MARCXML bulk extracts... - **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 catalog... - **CU Directory of Classes** — The public web directory of Columbia University class offerings, browsable by subject, department, semester, instruction method, weekday and start time. Live and fully readable,... - **Columbia Academic Commons** — Columbia University's institutional research repository, holding the scholarly output, theses and research data of the university. Unusually for this cohort it is NOT a vendor t... - **Digital Library Collections and the 10.7916 DOI namespace** — Columbia University Libraries' digital collections platform and the resolution target for Columbia's own DOI namespace. Columbia is a registered DataCite repository client (CUL.... - **IRI/LDEO Climate Data Library** — The Climate Data Library run by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, both Columbia University units. A long-run... - **CourseWorks (Instructure Canvas)** — Columbia's learning management system. The REST API is live and returns a well-structured JSON 401 to unauthenticated callers, and the LTI 1.3 tool-platform JWKS is publicly rea... - **Columbia University Data Platform (Redivis)** — Columbia's research data platform runs on Redivis as an institution-specific tenancy, and the university has registered two distinct DataCite repository clients against it — CUL... ## Agentic access (1) - **Columbia Agentic Access** — 0 operations ## Security (2) - **Columbia Authentication** — 6 schemes - **Columbia Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · DMARC ## Plans (1) - **Columbia Plans Pricing** ## Tags University, Higher Education, Education, Ivy League, Private Research University, United States, New York, Identity Federation, Library, Open Data, Research Repository, Research Data, Course Catalog, Campus Life --- Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/columbia/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.