Open Library vs Vedic Society

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.

The companion API to Rig Veda in Anindita Basu's Indica project, this one is a lexicon rather than a hymn index: it returns Nagari script, transliteration, category (flora, fauna, geography, kinship, and more), and meaning for nouns drawn from Vedic literature, via /words/{word}, /descriptions/{description}, and /categories/{category} endpoints. Like its sibling API, the stored docs URL had moved from a flat /html/vs.html page (now a 404) to the site's restructured /topics/ path; the live keyless backend at indica-1hwj.onrender.com/vs/v2 echoed a live Origin header back on a real /words/ash call, confirming CORS is open rather than unknown.