#public-domain

Wikisource as an API — the Wikimedia free digital library of original source texts. Wikisource collects public-domain and freely-licensed primary texts: classic literature, poetry and plays, historical speeches, treaties and constitutions, religious and philosophical works, landmark court decisions, essays, letters and more, faithfully transcribed. This API wraps the official Wikisource MediaWiki service into clean JSON. /v1/search?q=Gettysburg Address searches the library and returns matching work and page titles with a text snippet and word count. /v1/work?title=Gettysburg Address returns a work's metadata — a short description, a text preview, the total character length and the canonical URL. /v1/text?title=Gettysburg Address (Bliss copy) returns the full plain text of a work (rendered and cleaned from the wiki source, capped at 60,000 characters with a truncated flag when longer) — the actual readable document, including transcribed works that template-based pages assemble. Many works are split into sub-pages or exist in several versions, so use /v1/search to find the exact page title first. Ideal for digital-humanities and literature apps, e-reading and quotation tools, NLP corpora of historical texts, and education. Content is public domain or CC BY-SA. Distinct from book-metadata catalogues and encyclopaedias — this is the actual full text of primary sources and classic works. For free textbooks use the Wikibooks API, for the encyclopaedia the Wikipedia API.

api.oanor.com/wikisource-api

The Internet Archive as an API — the non-profit digital library of over 40 million freely accessible items: books and texts, audio and live-music concerts, films and video, software, images and archived web pages. Search the entire archive by keyword with full Lucene field syntax (by creator, title, subject, collection and more), filter by media type (texts, audio, movies, image, software, web, live concerts) and sort by downloads, date or trending popularity, getting each item's identifier, title, creator, media type, year, download count and collections; read an item's full metadata including its description, creators, subjects, language, collections, publisher, license, dates and total size; list an item's downloadable files with their format, size, length and a direct download URL; and look up the closest Wayback Machine snapshot of any web page — the archived flag, the snapshot date and HTTP status, and the web.archive.org link, optionally near a target timestamp. Ideal for research, digital preservation, media discovery, dataset building, link-rot recovery and apps that surface public-domain and openly-licensed culture. Data from the Internet Archive (archive.org).

api.oanor.com/archive-api

A corpus of 2,500+ classic public-domain poems by 127 authors (Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Poe, Frost and many more), via the PoetryDB collection. Look up a poem by title or id and get its full text, line by line; browse every poem by an author (or list all authors); full-text search across titles, authors and lines; or fetch a random poem (optionally by author or capped to a number of lines, perfect for a poem-of-the-day). Ideal for literary apps, education, writing tools, daily-poem widgets and creative projects.

api.oanor.com/poetry-api