Open Library vs Rig Veda

Open Library, an Internet Archive project, exposes its book catalog for search, work/edition/author lookups by identifier, subjects, and public reading lists, returned as JSON, YAML, or RDF/XML, with a separate Covers API serving cover art by ISBN or Open Library ID. No API key is required, though sending a descriptive User-Agent and contact email triples the default 1-request-per-second anonymous rate limit. Bulk access is deliberately kept off the live API — the project publishes free monthly data dumps for that instead.

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.