Brown University · Rate Limits

Brown Rate Limits

Brown publishes no rate-limit table and returns no rate-limit headers. What it does publish, in its own BDR API wiki, is a plain-language throttling notice; and what it enforces, observably, is a hard response-size cap and a Cloudflare bot-protection layer. Those three things are recorded here with their evidence. This artifact was corrected on 2026-08-30. The 2026-06-03 version advised honoring throttling on "OAI-PMH, IIIF, library" endpoints. Brown operates no OAI-PMH endpoint — seven candidate paths were probed and all returned 404 — so that guidance was describing a surface that does not exist.

Brown Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Brown University on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 3 rate-limit definitions, measuring documents-per-response, seconds-between-requests, and unspecified.

The profile also includes 2 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled and note.

Tagged areas include Education, Higher Education, University, and Rate Limiting.

3 Limits
EducationHigher EducationUniversityRate Limiting

Limits

Search response size request
documents-per-response
500
The only hard, observable limit on the surface, and it is undocumented. rows=501, rows=1000 and rows=99999 each returned exactly 500 documents with responseHeader.params.rows echoed as "500". The echo is the sole signal. Paginate with start, not by raising rows.
Crawl delay crawler
seconds-between-requests
30
Advisory. robots.txt also disallows /storage, /iiif, /iiif/image, /services, /viewers, /studio/login/ and /Shibboleth.sso/Login — note that /iiif is disallowed even though the item API hands out IIIF URLs, so an automated client following the API's own links is walking into a disallowed path.
Cloudflare bot protection client
unspecified
unpublished
Brown's own wiki states it directly: "In Spring 2025 we added features from Cloudflare to protect against bot traffic. This may affect users of the API, particularly if you are requesting a large volume of items at a high rate." Brown advises affiliates to connect over VPN to reduce the impact and to open a GitHub issue if it breaks a client. Observed firing on the /studio/ human surface; the /api/ JSON endpoints were not challenged at probe volume.

Policies

Backoff strategy
No published guidance beyond Brown's Cloudflare notice. Exponential backoff with jitter, page by start rather than by rows, and harvest off-peak. There is no Retry-After to honor.
Escalation path
Brown names one: open an issue on https://github.com/Brown-University-Library/bdr_api_documentation/issues if bot protection is blocking legitimate API use. That is an unusually concrete escalation route for a university API.

Sources

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