Brown University
Brown University is a private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Its genuinely institution-operated programmable footprint is narrow, real, and concentrated entirely in the Brown University Library. Three surfaces survive an operator check: the Brown Digital Repository (BDR) REST API, the BDR's IIIF Image and Presentation services, and a Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity provider. All three sit under brown.edu, and the identity provider resolves into Brown's own ARIN allocation (BROWN-UNIV, 128.148.252.0/24) behind a Brown-procured InCommon OV certificate, so the attribution is settled by address ownership rather than by hostname. The BDR API is the substantive find: a public, keyless, Solr-backed API over 1,147,400 objects, documented by Brown Library staff in the wiki of Brown's own GitHub repository, with 11,622 objects exposing DataCite DOIs on Brown's prefix 10.26300. It is more than most universities in this cohort operate. It is also unversioned, sends no CORS headers, returns nine-byte text/html bodies on failure, silently caps results at 500 rows, and answers malformed queries with HTTP 200 and an empty result set rather than the 400 its own documentation promises. There is no OAI-PMH endpoint on any probed path — an absence worth stating, because reviewers assume an institutional repository has one. Everything else that looks like a Brown API is a vendor platform running under a Brown hostname and is recorded here as a tenant relationship, not as a Brown contract: library discovery is Ex Libris Primo VE (bruknow.library.brown.edu terminates on Ex Libris (USA) Inc address space), the course catalog and bulletin are Leepfrog CourseLeaf (cab.brown.edu and bulletin.brown.edu CNAME to courseleaf.com), and the events calendar is LiveWhale (events.brown.edu CNAMEs to lwcal.com). Two of those tenant platforms expose genuinely useful public JSON — Courses@Brown returns full section, meeting-time and instructor data with no key, and Events@Brown serves a 3MB JSON feed and an iCal feed — but that engineering is the vendor's. No central developer portal, no open data portal, and no institution-operated course or registrar API exist; the one that did, the student-built api.students.brown.edu, has been 404 since before this profile was first written.
Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.
API Evangelist profiles Brown University the way a machine reads it — 33 machine-readable artifacts across 2 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Brown University scores 34.0/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 27/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance. Every facet and dimension name is a link: it opens that measurement's page on APIs.io, where the rating runs across the whole catalog — the exact checks that feed it, how every profiled provider distributes on it, and who is at the top of it.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-09-10 · rubric v0.20.0
Put this on your own site. The badge is drawn live from Brown University's current Kin Score — paste it once and it updates itself every time the score is recomputed. It follows your visitor's light or dark setting, and it links back here so anyone who sees it can read the full breakdown.
<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
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</a>[](https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/brown/)<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
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title="Brown University on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/brown/card.svg"
alt="Brown University Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="340" height="120" loading="lazy">
</a>More shapes, themes and sizes → · Score as JSON · How badges work
How we profile Brown University
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Brown University. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 7
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Brown Digital Repository (BDR) API
The Brown University Library's public, keyless REST API over the Brown Digital Repository — an item API, a collection API, a Solr-backed search API, and a two-key link index at ...
Brown Digital Repository IIIF Image and Presentation API
The BDR's IIIF surface, on the same institution-operated host. IIIF Image API 2.x (info.json reports a 6335x8560 source with a seven-step size pyramid and 512x512 tiles for the ...
Brown University Identity Provider (Shibboleth / SAML 2.0)
Brown's Shibboleth identity provider, and the strongest machine-readable contract in this profile. Brown self-publishes signed per-entity SAML metadata at the entityID itself — ...
BruKnow Library Discovery (Ex Libris Primo VE tenant)
Brown University Library's discovery layer. search.library.brown.edu redirects to bruknow.library.brown.edu/discovery/search?vid=01BU_INST:BROWN, an Ex Libris Primo VE instance....
Courses@Brown (Leepfrog CourseLeaf tenant)
Brown's course search and registration front end. It exposes a live, public, keyless JSON API at cab.brown.edu/api/ — a POST interface with page=fose routes for search and detai...
Brown University Bulletin (Leepfrog CourseLeaf CAT tenant)
The university's academic catalog of programs, concentrations and requirements, on the same vendor as Courses@Brown but a separate deployment. Human-readable; no public JSON int...
Events@Brown (LiveWhale Calendar tenant)
Brown's university-wide events calendar, serving a public JSON feed at /live/json/events (3,128,496 bytes on 2026-08-30) and an iCalendar feed at /live/ical/events (2,101,266 by...
Scroll within the panel for all 7 ·
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the things the Kin Score reads for access clarity — renamed from commercial clarity in rubric 0.12, because a free statutory interface has access terms and no commercial ones.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Brown Plans Pricing
PLANSRate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Brown Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Brown Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Brown Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 2
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
Brown University API Rules
SPECTRALBrown University API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 11
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
ApiRoot
JSON SCHEMACollection
JSON SCHEMACollectionList
JSON SCHEMACollectionRef
JSON SCHEMADocument
JSON SCHEMAImageInfo
JSON SCHEMAItem
JSON SCHEMAItemLinks
JSON SCHEMAManifest
JSON SCHEMARelations
JSON SCHEMASearchResponse
JSON SCHEMAScroll within the panel for all 11 ·
Examples 7
Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.
Example request and response payloads for these APIs.
Bdr Api Root
EXAMPLEBdr Collections Top Level
EXAMPLEBdr Iiif Image Info
EXAMPLEBdr Item
EXAMPLEBdr Search Filtered
EXAMPLEBdr Search Malformed Query
EXAMPLEScroll within the panel for all 7 ·
Security Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Brown University — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Documentation 6
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Design & Contract 6
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 4
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 2
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Learn 1
Tutorials, courses, talks, and written guidance
Operate 2
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 4
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 3
The organization behind the API
Other 6
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/brown · machine-readable index on apis.io
This is an independent, third-party profile of Brown University, published by API Evangelist. We do not operate, host, resell, or support these APIs, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by the company unless stated above. Everything here is built from publicly available information — the company's own site, developer portal, documentation, public repositories, and the specifications it publishes for public use. Nothing is obtained by breaching a system, defeating an access control, or using credentials.
The Kin Score and Agent Readiness rating are independently calculated assessments of a company's public API artifacts, scored against a published rubric. They are not certifications, endorsements, security assessments, or audits.
Corrections, re-scores, and removal are free — no partnership or purchase required, and you do not need to justify the request. A removed company is recorded as unrated, never scored zero for having asked. Acknowledgement within one business day; removal within two.
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