# University of British Columbia

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/ubc/  
**Website:** https://www.ubc.ca/  
**APIs profiled:** 7

The University of British Columbia is a public research university with campuses in Vancouver and Kelowna, British Columbia, and a member of Canada's U15 research group. Its programmable footprint is real but narrow, and almost all of it sits in UBC Library rather than in central IT. UBC Library operates the Open Collections API over the university's digitized archival and research collections, a IIIF Presentation endpoint over the same items, and the Abacus research-data repository — a Dataverse 5.9 deployment on UBC's own infrastructure that also serves a live OAI-PMH archive emitting DataCite kernel-4 and DDI Codebook metadata. Central IT publishes exactly one machine-readable artifact to the open internet: the SAML metadata for UBC's own Shibboleth identity provider at authentication.ubc.ca. Everything else the Office of the CIO runs is deliberately closed — the Integration Enablement Centre's MuleSoft gateway answers at api.ubc.ca with a flat 403, its API catalogue sits behind UBC's Confluence login, and entitlement is granted per-API through a Data Access Framework request rather than a developer portal. There is no public course, timetable or registrar API; course planning moved into Workday and the community projects that fill the gap are student-built and not endorsed by the university. UBC has no central developer portal, no API changelog and no deprecation policy, and every ubc.ca host sits behind a bot defence that answers automated clients with an HTML block page carrying HTTP 200.

## Kin Score — 49.8 / 100 (developing)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: rising (+19.8 from 30.0).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 74.1 |
| Contract Quality | 61.0 |
| Governance | 9.8 |
| Contract Governance | 9.8 |
| Operational Transparency | 36.8 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 35.7 |
| Commercial Clarity | 34.2 |
| Access Clarity | 34.2 |

Regulatory layer — **Education & Research**: 75.9 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 35.9 (agent-ready)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | verified |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| 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

Free — onboarding: unknown, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (7)

- **UBC Library Open Collections API** — Public REST/JSON API over UBC Library's Open Collections — the university's digitized historical, archival and research holdings. Operated by UBC Library on UBC's own infrastruc...
- **UBC Library Open Collections IIIF Presentation API** — IIIF Presentation manifests for Open Collections items, served from UBC Library's own host. Verified live 2026-08-19: a 10,560-byte JSON manifest returned for an item in the UBC...
- **UBC Library Abacus Dataverse API** — The REST API of Abacus, UBC Library's research-data repository, running Dataverse 5.9 on UBC's own infrastructure at abacus.library.ubc.ca. UBC operates the deployment and the d...
- **Abacus OAI-PMH Metadata Harvesting Endpoint** — A working OAI-PMH 2.0 archive on UBC Library's own host. Verified live 2026-08-19: verb=Identify returns repositoryName "Abacus Data Network Dataverse OAI Archive", adminEmail a...
- **UBC Shibboleth Identity Provider Metadata** — UBC's own SAML 2.0 identity provider metadata, entityID https://authentication.ubc.ca, asserting the ubc.ca scope. Institution-operated by definition — no vendor can publish thi...
- **UBC Integration Enablement Centre API Gateway** — UBC's enterprise API gateway, run by the Office of the CIO's Integration Enablement Centre against the University Data Model. The host is real and answers — api.ubc.ca returns a...
- **UBC IT Service Status API** — Machine-readable service status for UBC IT at status.it.ubc.ca, on UBC's own hostname but CNAMEd to stspg-customer.com — UBC's tenant of Atlassian Statuspage. The status data is...

## Agentic access (1)

- **Ubc Agentic Access** — 378 operations · 177 acting · 5 human-in-the-loop

## Security (3)

- **Ubc Authentication** — 0 schemes
- **Ubc Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC
- **Ubc Vulnerability Disclosure** — security.txt · contact published

## Plans (1)

- **Ubc Plans Pricing**

## Tags

Education, Higher Education, University, Public Research University, Canada, British Columbia, U15, Library, Digital Collections, Research Data, Research Repository, Open Data, Identity Federation, OAI-PMH, IIIF, Dataverse

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