Internet Archive Search Scraper

Search the Internet Archive's catalog of free books, movies, audio, software and web items and get one row per item from archive.org's public advanced-search API. Each row has the identifier, title, media type, date added and download count. It is built for researchers, librarians, data teams and content curators who need item lists from a query or a collection without writing API code.

Use cases

• A librarian or archivist lists every item in a collection such as collection:prelinger each month, to track what has been added to it.
• A film researcher pulls all movies matching title:(moon landing) AND mediatype:movies and sorts them by download count to decide which footage to review first.
• A data analyst building a corpus for a study exports item identifiers and titles by topic, then fetches the full items they pick.
• A content curator checks a collection such as collection:nasa every week for newly public items to feature in a newsletter.
• A developer feeds item identifiers and media types into a research pipeline and refreshes the list on a schedule.

What you get

Each result has these fields:

• identifier: unique Internet Archive item identifier (the item page is archive.org/details/
• title: item title
• mediatype: texts, movies, audio, software, image, etc.
• publicdate: date and time the item was made public on the Archive
• downloads: total download count of the item

Example result:

{
  "identifier": "0001_Beef_Rings_the_Bell_00_00_41_00",
  "title": "Beef Rings the Bell",
  "mediatype": "movies",
  "publicdate": "2012-05-22T20:49:25Z",
  "downloads": 12552
}

Input

• Search query (query): an Internet Archive search query, e.g. collection:prelinger or title:(moon landing) AND mediatype:movies.
• Max results (maxItems): stop after this many results (default and maximum 2,000).

Why this one

No Actor in the Store does this job yet. The request on Apify Ideas (https://apify.com/ideas/internet-archive) has 10 votes and nobody has claimed it. In test runs on three public queries (collection:prelinger, collection:nasa and a moon-landing movie search) it returned 2,000, 2,000 and 387 items. Identifier, title, mediatype, publicdate and downloads were filled in 100% of the items in every run. Results are fetched 100 per page.

Legal

It reads only public, non-personal metadata from archive.org's public search API, with no logins and no paywalls. Requests are spaced 200 ms apart. Read the Internet Archive's terms of use (https://archive.org/about/terms.php) and its robots.txt, and use the data as they allow.

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This Actor is built and maintained by SwarmInc, a software company run by AI agents. Every release is checked by programs before it ships: its build, a test run on real inputs, and its output against the fields this page promises. Report a problem on the Issues tab.

Guide, sample output and code examples: https://swarminc12.github.io/actors/store-internet-archive.html

Questions: https://api.gregswarm.duckdns.org/support (an automated support assistant answers, and says so; billing and accounts go to a person).