# University of Pennsylvania **Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/university-of-pennsylvania/ **Website:** https://www.upenn.edu/ **APIs profiled:** 10 The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia. Penn operates no central developer portal and publishes no institution-wide API program, and the surface that the 2026-06-03 profile treated as its headline API — the Penn OpenData API on the ISC enterprise service bus — is retired: the host esb.isc-seo.upenn.edu no longer resolves and its documentation page returns a soft-404. What Penn genuinely operates is library and identity infrastructure: the PennKey Shibboleth identity provider, whose signed SAML 2.0 metadata resolves live in the InCommon federation; ScholarlyCommons at Penn, a DSpace 7.6 repository on Penn's own domain serving a conformant OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint over real Penn records; the Franklin catalog and the Colenda digital repository, both Blacklight applications with JSON twins on every page under Penn Libraries' published open-metadata policy; and OPenn, a bulk open-data site of manuscript images and TEI descriptions. The far larger and better known surface — Penn Course Alert, Penn Course Plan, Penn Course Review, Penn Degree Plan and Penn Clubs, with a live 45-path OpenAPI at penncourseplan.com/api/openapi/ — is NOT operated by the university. It is built and run by Penn Labs, a non-profit student-run software organization, on domains registered to Penn Labs. Penn's Office of Student Affairs adopted Penn Clubs as its official student-group registry, which is institutional endorsement of the product, not institutional operation of the API. Those surfaces are recorded here as tenant relationships so the relationship is preserved without crediting Penn for engineering it did not do. ## Kin Score — 35.0 / 100 (thin) Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+4.4 from 30.6). | Facet | Score | |---|---| | Discoverability | 64.8 | | Contract Quality | 54.6 | | Governance | 9.8 | | Contract Governance | 9.8 | | Operational Transparency | 26.3 | | Developer Ergonomics | 11.9 | | Commercial Clarity | 39.5 | | Access Clarity | 39.5 | Regulatory layer — **Education & Research**: 27.8 (matched via tags). ## Agent readiness — 20.5 (agent-aware) | Dimension | Value | |---|---| | Spec Presence | yes | | Agentic Access | derived | | Reversibility Documented | no | | MCP Server | no | | Auth Clarity | no | | Idempotency | no | | Error Semantics | no | | 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: medium). ## APIs (10) - **Penn Courses API (Penn Course Alert / Plan / Review / Degree Plan)** — One API, four student-facing products: Penn Course Alert (PCA), Penn Course Plan (PCP), Penn Course Review (PCR) and Penn Degree Plan (PDP), plus a shared Accounts resource. The... - **Penn Clubs API** — JSON API behind Penn Clubs, the student-organization directory that Penn's Office of Student Affairs adopted as its official student-group registration system. /api/clubs return... - **Penn SDK (Python)** — Open-source Python client maintained by Penn Labs wrapping Penn data services. Published documentation at penn-sdk.readthedocs.io returned HTTP 200. An SDK is a client, not an i... - **Penn SDK (JavaScript / Node)** — Open-source JavaScript/Node client from Penn Labs. Documentation is hosted on js.org, a community subdomain service, at penn-sdk.js.org (HTTP 200) — a code/docs host, not a vend... - **PennKey Identity Provider — SAML 2.0 / Shibboleth Metadata** — Penn's Shibboleth identity provider publishes a signed SAML 2.0 EntityDescriptor at a well-known location (HTTP 200, application/xml, entityID https://idp.pennkey.upenn.edu/idp/... - **ScholarlyCommons at Penn — OAI-PMH** — Conformant OAI-PMH 2.0 harvesting endpoint for ScholarlyCommons at Penn, the university's institutional research repository, on Penn's own host under Handle prefix 20.500.14332.... - **ScholarlyCommons at Penn — DSpace REST API** — DSpace 7.6 HAL+JSON REST API on Penn's own host. The API root returned HTTP 200 advertising dspaceName "ScholarlyCommons at Penn" and the full DSpace link relation set; content ... - **Penn Libraries Franklin Catalog — JSON API** — JSON:API surface of Franklin, the Penn Libraries discovery catalog, operated by Penn Libraries on find.library.upenn.edu. /catalog.json returned HTTP 200 with links, meta.pages ... - **Colenda Digital Repository — Search JSON** — Penn Libraries' digital repository at colenda.library.upenn.edu exposes a Blacklight/Solr JSON search response (/catalog.json returned HTTP 200, ~59 KB, anonymous). Institution-... - **OPenn — Open Manuscript Data** — Penn Libraries' bulk open-data site publishing high-resolution manuscript images and TEI/XML descriptions in the public domain, laid out as a plainly-navigable directory tree (o... ## Agentic access (1) - **University Of Pennsylvania Agentic Access** — 68 operations · 30 acting · 2 human-in-the-loop ## Security (2) - **University Of Pennsylvania Authentication** — 0 schemes - **University Of Pennsylvania Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC ## Plans (1) - **University Of Pennsylvania Plans Pricing** ## Tags Education, Higher Education, University, Research University, Ivy League, United States, Philadelphia, Open Data, Library, Course Catalog, Research Repository, Identity Federation, OAI-PMH, Student Developers --- Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/university-of-pennsylvania/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.