Internet Archive Search Scraper

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Search and retrieve items from the Internet Archive (archive.org) — the world's largest digital library with 44M+ books, videos, audio recordings, software, and web archives. Free, no API key required.

What does this actor do?

This actor lets you:

• Search the entire Internet Archive by keyword with filters for media type, collection, language, date range, and sort order.
• Fetch specific items by their unique Archive.org identifiers, getting enriched metadata including file counts and item sizes.

Data Source

All data is retrieved from the Internet Archive public API:

• Advanced Search API: https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php — free, no authentication required.
• Metadata API: https://archive.org/metadata/{identifier} — free, no authentication required.

Input

Example Inputs

Search for classic literature texts:

{
"mode":"search",
"query":"shakespeare",
"mediaType":"texts",
"language":"eng",
"maxItems":25
}

Fetch specific items by identifier:

{
"mode":"byIdentifiers",
"identifiers":["gutenberg-hamlet","adventures_of_huckleberry_finn_librivox"],
"maxItems":10
}

Search for audio recordings in a date range:

{
"mode":"search",
"query":"blues music",
"mediaType":"audio",
"dateFrom":"1920",
"dateTo":"1960",
"sortBy":"-publicdate",
"maxItems":100
}

Output

Each item in the dataset contains:

Example Output

{
"identifier":"gutenberg-hamlet",
"url":"https://archive.org/details/gutenberg-hamlet",
"title":"Hamlet",
"description":"A classic tragedy by William Shakespeare",
"creator":"William Shakespeare",
"date":"1603",
"mediatype":"texts",
"collection":"gutenbergbooks",
"language":"eng",
"subject":["drama","tragedy","Shakespeare"],
"format":["PDF","EPUB","Plain Text"],
"downloads":85432,
"scrapedAt":"2026-01-15T10:30:00+00:00"
}

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this free to use? Yes. The Internet Archive provides a completely free public API with no authentication required.

How many items can I retrieve? Up to 5,000 items per run using the maxItems parameter.

What media types are available? Texts (books), Audio, Movies/Video, Software, Images, Live Music (etree), Data sets, Web Archives, and Collections.

Can I filter by collection? Yes — use the collection field with a collection slug (e.g. "gutenbergbooks" for Project Gutenberg books, "librivoxaudio" for LibriVox audiobooks, "prelinger" for Prelinger Archives films).

Can I search in specific languages? Yes — use ISO 639-3 language codes like "eng" (English), "fra" (French), "spa" (Spanish), "deu" (German).

What are identifiers? Every Internet Archive item has a unique identifier (e.g. "gutenberg-hamlet"). You can find these in Archive.org URLs: archive.org/details/{identifier}.

How is the data rate-limited? The actor adds a 0.3s delay between search pages and 0.5s between metadata requests to respect the API's guidelines.

Use Cases

• Building digital library catalogs
• Research on public domain content
• Finding historical audio/video recordings
• Locating old software for preservation research
• Downloading metadata for academic research
• Tracking download statistics for archive items