iDigBio vs SHARE

iDigBio is a keyless REST API exposing more than 150 million digitized natural-history specimen records — pressed plants, pinned insects, fossils, and more — contributed by U.S. museums and herbaria under an NSF-funded national digitization effort. Search and summary endpoints return Darwin Core fields (collector, locality, taxonomic name) as JSON, and the same backend powers iDigBio's public specimen-browsing portal.

SHARE (now internally rebranded "trove", version 26.0.0 as of this check) is the Center for Open Science's free aggregator of metadata about research and scholarly activity, pulling in tens of millions of records from sources like CrossRef and OSF and re-indexing them for keyless search. Its v2 API exposes an Elasticsearch-backed search endpoint plus RSS and Atom feeds, all reachable with no registration.