Library of Congress Digital Collection Scraper

What it does

Searches the Library of Congress digital collections for items matching a query and extracts metadata including title, date, contributors, subjects, description, and image URL.

This Apify actor automates the collection of data from a public API, extracting structured information and saving it directly into an Apify dataset. It handles pagination automatically, supports configurable result limits, and includes robust error handling with timeouts on all HTTP requests. The actor is designed for reliability: it validates inputs, applies sensible defaults, and produces a fallback record when no results are found, so your downstream workflows never receive an empty dataset.

Why use it

Manually collecting data from web APIs is tedious and error-prone. This actor eliminates that burden by running in the cloud on the Apify platform, where it can be scheduled, integrated with webhooks, or chained with other actors. Whether you are conducting market research, building a knowledge base, monitoring package ecosystems, or feeding data into an analytics pipeline, this actor gives you structured, ready-to-use JSON output with zero browser overhead. It uses lightweight HTTP requests instead of a full browser, which makes it fast and cost-effective.

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
searchQuery	string	Yes	"civil war photographs"	The search term to use when querying the API.
maxResults	integer	No	100	Maximum number of results to return (1 to 1000).

Output data

Each item in the output dataset contains the following fields:

• id - Library of Congress item identifier.
• title - Item title.
• date - Date associated with the item.
• contributors - Comma-separated list of contributors.
• subjects - Comma-separated list of subjects.
• description - Item description text.
• url - Direct URL to the item.
• imageUrl - URL to the first associated image.

All string fields are null-checked; missing values are stored as null rather than undefined.

Example output

{
    "id": "http://www.loc.gov/item/2018666430/",
    "title": "Civil War photographs, 1861-1865",
    "date": "1861",
    "contributors": "Brady, Mathew B.",
    "subjects": "United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Photography",
    "description": "Collection of Civil War era photographs.",
    "url": "https://www.loc.gov/item/2018666430/",
    "imageUrl": "https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/cwpb/04000/04072v.jpg"
}

Pricing

This actor is priced on a usage basis:

• $0.01 per result returned in the dataset.
• $0.005 per actor start (fixed platform fee).

For example, scraping 500 results would cost approximately $5.005. Apify provides free monthly credits for new users, so you can try the actor at no charge.

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• npm Registry Package Scraper
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• Packagist PHP Package Scraper

Visit the brave_paradise profile on Apify to see the full catalogue of actors.