Archives Data Service

A slim API in front of our institutional image archive

This API standardizes and simplifies access to data that is available through the CONTENTdm API. Clients don't have to know all the parameters that CONTENTdm's API requires, or how to filter the data. Nor do they need to worry about limitations in the number of records they's able to retrieve. They have a few simple endpoints to retrieve the data they're most likely going to need.

This API was built in-house in 2017. In 2022, we decided to retire this API because it was no longer in active use at that time. Although we are not maintaining this codebase, it is available for reference as a public archive.

Features

This project provides the following endpoints. You can see their details in swagger.json:

/v1/archival-images - Get a list of all archival images, sorted by the date they were last updated in descending order. Includes pagination options.
/v1/archival-images/X - Get a single archival image

Overview

This API is part of a larger project at the Art Institute of Chicago to build a data hub for all of our published data—a single place that our forthcoming website and future products can access all the data they might be interested in in a simple, normalized, RESTful way. This project provides an API in front of our institutional image archive that will feed into the data hub.

Requirements

In our development, we've used the following software:

PHP 7.1 (may work in earlier versions but hasn't been tested)
MySQL 5.7 (may work in earlier versions but hasn't been tested)
Composer

Installing

To get started with this project, use the following commands:

# Clone the repo to your computer
git clone https://github.com/art-institute-of-chicago/data-service-archives.git

# Enter the folder that was created by the clone
cd data-service-archives

# Install PHP dependencies
composer install

# Create a symlink for generated files
php artisan storage:link

Developing

First you'll need to create a .env file and update it to reflect your environment. We've provided an example file to get you started:

# Copy the example file
cp .env.example .env

# Generate a new key for your Laravel project
php artisan key:generate

Then, to create the database tables and seed them with fake data, run:

php artisan migrate --seed

This will create all the tables and relationships, and fill the tables with data from the Faker PHP library.

Importing real data

We've broken up the import process into two step. First, download a local copy of all the JSON data the API returns. This represents the full source data:

php artisan archives:download

The using your local cache, import all the JSON data to your database:

php artisan archives:import

Contributing

This project is archived. We are not accepting contributions to it at this time.

You can reach our engineering team at engineering@artic.edu

Licensing

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3.