British National Bibliography vs Rig Veda

The British National Bibliography is the British Library's record of everything published in the UK and Ireland since 1950, now published as BIBFRAME/RDA linked open data through the multi-national "Share Family" platform. Its original bnb.data.bl.uk endpoint has been offline since the Library's October 2023 cyber-attack destroyed its digital infrastructure; the catalog has since resurfaced on a beta institutional search portal, per the Library's own service-status and metadata-services pages.

Part of Anindita Basu's Indica project, this API fetches structured metadata for every hymn in the Rig Veda Samhita — which mandal and sukta it belongs to, its meter, its poet, and which god(s) it's addressed to — through endpoints like /mandal/{n}, /sungfor/{god}/meters, and /pairs/{god}/{poet}, rather than the hymn text itself. The stored docs URL had moved from a flat /html/rv.html page (now a 404) to a restructured /topics/ path on the same GitHub Pages site; the live backend at indica-1hwj.onrender.com/rv/v3 needs no key and echoed a live Origin header back on both a GET and an OPTIONS preflight. Being a free Render-hosted hobby service, it can take some seconds to wake up from an idle cold start.