# University of Manchester

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/university-of-manchester/  
**Website:** https://www.manchester.ac.uk/  
**APIs profiled:** 5

The University of Manchester is a public research university in Manchester, England, a founding member of the Russell Group and, on the QS World University Rankings, a consistent global top-40 institution. Its programmable footprint is small, real, and almost entirely mis-stated by its own domain names. The University operates exactly three machine-readable surfaces of its own: a IIIF Presentation API and a IIIF Image API serving the John Rylands Library's digitised manuscripts from the University's own hosts and its own JANET address space, and a Shibboleth SAML 2.0 Identity Provider registered in the Jisc UK Access Management Federation under entityID https://shib.manchester.ac.uk/shibboleth. Everything else that looks like a Manchester API is a tenancy: pure.manchester.ac.uk and research.manchester.ac.uk both CNAME to uom-aws.elsevierpure.com and serve Elsevier's Pure product API and OAI-PMH implementation; figshare.manchester.ac.uk CNAMEs to figshare.com. Those are Manchester's records on a supplier's platform, under a supplier's contract, and they are recorded here as tenant relationships rather than credited as the University's engineering. There is no central developer portal, no self-service API keys, no open data portal at data.manchester.ac.uk, and no public course, timetable or SIS API. Thirty-six OpenAPI documents previously held in this repository were Elsevier's Pure 5.35.2-2 specification split by tag and re-titled; they have been quarantined, not counted.

## Kin Score — 48.6 / 100 (developing)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: rising (+12.0 from 36.6).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 74.1 |
| Contract Quality | 68.2 |
| Governance | 34.1 |
| Contract Governance | 34.1 |
| Operational Transparency | 26.3 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 19.0 |
| Commercial Clarity | 50.0 |
| Access Clarity | 50.0 |

Regulatory layer — **Education & Research**: 46.3 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 35.0 (agent-ready)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | no |
| 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 | no |

## Access

Free · No registration (institution-operated surfaces) — onboarding: unknown, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (5)

- **Manchester Digital Collections — IIIF Presentation API** — IIIF Presentation API 2.1 over the University of Manchester Library's digitised manuscripts, archives and rare books. Serves sc:Manifest documents at /iiif/{documentId} and sc:C...
- **Manchester Digital Collections — IIIF Image API** — IIIF Image API 2.0 at compliance level 1, serving regions, scaled derivatives, rotations and quality variants of the Library's digitised page images. Self-describes through info...
- **Shibboleth SAML Identity Provider (UK Access Management Federation)** — The University's own Shibboleth Identity Provider, entityID https://shib.manchester.ac.uk/shibboleth, asserting the scope manchester.ac.uk. Its entity descriptor is published as...
- **Elsevier Pure CRIS tenancy (REST + OAI-PMH)** — The University's tenancy of Elsevier Pure, its Current Research Information System, reached at pure.manchester.ac.uk and surfaced publicly as Research Explorer at research.manch...
- **Figshare research data repository tenancy** — The University's institutional research data repository, presented at figshare.manchester.ac.uk, which CNAMEs to figshare.com. Manchester's researchers deposit here and the depo...

## Agentic access (1)

- **University Of Manchester Agentic Access** — 4 operations

## Security (2)

- **University Of Manchester Authentication** — saml2/none · 2 schemes
- **University Of Manchester Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **University Of Manchester Plans Pricing**

## Tags

University, Higher Education, Education, Research, United Kingdom, Russell Group, Library, Digital Collections, IIIF, Identity Federation, Research Data, Research Computing

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