Welcome!

The guide you are reading contains:

  • a high-level introduction to the Fatcat catalog and software
  • a bibliographic style guide for editors, also useful for understanding metadata found in the catalog
  • technical details and guidance for use of the catalog's public REST API, for developers building bots, services, or contributing to the server software
  • policies and licensing details for all contributors and downstream users of the catalog

What is Fatcat?

Fatcat is an open bibliographic catalog of written works. The scope of works is somewhat flexible, with a focus on published research outputs like journal articles, pre-prints, and conference proceedings. Records are collaboratively editable, versioned, available in bulk form, and include URL-agnostic file-level metadata.

Both the Fatcat software and the metadata stored in the service are free (in both the libre and gratis sense) for others to share, reuse, fork, or extend. See Policies for licensing details, and Sources for attribution of the foundational metadata corpuses we build on top of.

Fatcat is currently used internally at the Internet Archive, but interested folks are welcome to contribute to it's design and development, and we hope to ultimately crowd-source corrections and additional to bibliographic metadata, and receive direct automated feeds of new content.

You can contact the Archive by email at webservices@archive.org, or the author directly at bnewbold@archive.org.