Cool! Marvel Comics Opens Up Their Metadata for Non-Commercial Use with New API

Here’s a new API and some cool metadata that the library community/library developers might want to take a look at. The API is also one libraries who teach basic programming might want to know about.
From Marvel:

This represents the first API program by any major comic book publisher and provides an innovative way for fans to interact with Marvel Entertainment and Marvel’s digital content.
The Marvel Comics API is a set of web services that give fans access to Marvel’s rich repository of data about over 30,000 comics and 7,000 series.
From feeds on blogs to mini-applications, developers everywhere can use the Marvel Comics API to create compelling digital experiences using Marvel’s treasure trove of data.
Peter Olson, VP of Web & Application Development says, “Our API program is a cool new way to explore and interact with Marvel Comics. Unlike lists of books, movies, or news articles, our comics are an inter-connected web (no Spidey pun intended!) of data spanning 75 years. It’s the relationships between them that are fascinating. Everything is connected and continues to expand as more comics are released each week. With our API program, once again, Marvel is changing the comics and publishing technology landscape.”

From SD Times:

The six different types of API data available are:

• Comics: Individual print and digital comic issues, collections and graphic novels

• Comic series: Sequentially numbered (well, mostly sequentially numbered) comics with the same title

• Comic stories: Indivisible, reusable components of comics. For example, the cover for Amazing Fantasy #15 or the Spider-Man origin story from that issue

• Comic events and crossovers: Big, universe-altering storylines

• Creators: Women, men and organizations who created comics

• Characters: The women, men, organizations, alien species, deities, animals, non-corporeal entities, trans-dimensional

• manifestations, abstract personifications, and green amorphous blobs that occupy the Marvel Universe (and various alternate universes, timelines and realities therein)

Learn More About the API/Register For Access
Direct to Interactive API Tester
Direct to Marvel Metadata/API Terms of Use
Take a Brief Tour of the Developers Portal (via Fast Company)

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing