Library of Congress & Chronicling America
The Library of Congress publishes its digitised collections on loc.gov, including Chronicling America, its collection of historic American newspapers. Through ScholarMuse an agent can search newspaper pages by the words in their scanned text, or search photographs, maps and manuscripts by keyword and year, and get the title, date, place, a text snippet, image links and the item page for each result.
ScholarMuse tools: search_archives. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from Library of Congress.
search_archives
These are the fields on Library of Congress items. The same tool also returns Europeana items unless the agent limits sources to loc. newspaperTitle and snippetIsOcr appear on newspaper pages only; contributor on other items only.
- date
- Date of the item or newspaper issue
- kind
- newspaper, or the item's original format
- newspaperTitle
- Title of the newspaper the page belongs to
- contributor
- Up to three creators or contributors
- place
- City and state for newspapers, locations for other items
- language
- Language of the item
- lccn
- Library of Congress Control Number, when present
- rights
- Rights note, pointing to the item page statement
- thumbnailUrl
- Small image of the item
- imageUrl
- Largest image rendition listed
- snippet
- Start of the description, or of a page's OCR text
- snippetIsOcr
- True when the snippet is OCR text
What it covers
- Historic American newspaper pages in Chronicling America, searched by the words in the scanned page text.
- Photographs, maps and manuscripts in the Library of Congress digital collections, or all formats at once.
- Results can be narrowed to a range of years.
Limits
- At most 50 items per call (10 by default); when Europeana is searched too, the two sources share that number.
- For newspapers every word of the query must appear on the page, and only the first 600 characters of the OCR text are returned, not the full page.
- Rights vary by item. The tool returns a general rights note, so check the statement on the item page before reuse.
- Requests to loc.gov are spaced about 3 seconds apart and can take up to 40 seconds, so this search can be slow.
How ScholarMuse reaches Library of Congress
The connector calls the loc.gov JSON API. Newspaper searches go to the Chronicling America collection on loc.gov at page level; other searches go to the loc.gov photos, maps, manuscripts or general search endpoints. No API key is sent.
Responses are cached for up to 1 day, so newly added items can take a day to appear.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: Rights vary by item; see the rights statement on each item page
Library of Congress (loc.gov), including Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.
Records that come from Library of Congress carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow Library of Congress's own citation guidance.
