Columbia University
Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City, ranked seventeenth in the QS World University Rankings. Its programmable footprint is small, real, and almost entirely invisible from the outside. Columbia operates exactly one publicly consumable, unauthenticated API of its own: the Columbia University Libraries Hours API at hours.library.columbia.edu, two read operations returning JSON with CORS enabled, built on Columbia's own openly published Rails codebase and documented by nobody. Alongside it the university runs a production Shibboleth Identity Provider that publishes signed SAML 2.0 metadata under the InCommon entityID urn:mace:incommon:columbia.edu, mints DOIs under its own DataCite prefix 10.7916 across 1.1 million registered identifiers, deposits into Crossref as member 6984, and releases the entire CLIO library catalogue as CC0 MARCXML bulk extracts. That is the whole of it. The Open Data Service that Columbia describes as its developer-facing service is gated behind a UNI login, and the IRI/LDEO Climate Data Library now redirects its data paths to a login form. Columbia publishes no OpenAPI, no developer portal reachable without affiliation, no changelog, no llms.txt and no API terms, and it reserves the hostname api.library.columbia.edu while serving nothing but a placeholder there. Most consequentially for machine access, Columbia defends its estate with two different anti-bot products: a Cloudflare managed challenge across the central web estate, and an Anubis proof-of-work challenge in front of the Libraries' entire discovery layer — the CLIO catalogue, Academic Commons and GeoData — which returns HTTP 200 with a bot-check body and made the institution's OAI-PMH endpoint unverifiable. Learning management runs on Instructure's Canvas and the research data platform on Redivis; both are tenant relationships, recorded as such and scored against their vendors.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles Columbia University the way a machine reads it — 27 machine-readable artifacts across 1 API, 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 — Columbia University scores 44.7/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 42/100 (agent native). 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 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0
Put this on your own site. The badge is drawn live from Columbia 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 -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/columbia/"
title="Columbia University on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/columbia.svg"
alt="Columbia University Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="150" height="150" loading="lazy">
</a>[](https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/columbia/)<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/columbia/"
title="Columbia University on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/columbia/card.svg"
alt="Columbia 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 Columbia University
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Columbia 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 10
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.
Columbia Identity — Shibboleth IdP and CAS
Columbia University Information Technology operates the university's own identity infrastructure: a production Shibboleth Identity Provider publishing signed SAML 2.0 metadata a...
CLIO Library Catalog Open Data
Columbia University Libraries publishes its full catalogue — bibliographic and holdings records from the integrated library system behind CLIO — as gzipped MARCXML bulk extracts...
Columbia Open Data Service
The central university service publishing data feeds to software developers in programming-friendly formats such as JSON and XML — the course directory, the CLIO library catalog...
CU Directory of Classes
The public web directory of Columbia University class offerings, browsable by subject, department, semester, instruction method, weekday and start time. Live and fully readable,...
Columbia Academic Commons
Columbia University's institutional research repository, holding the scholarly output, theses and research data of the university. Unusually for this cohort it is NOT a vendor t...
Digital Library Collections and the 10.7916 DOI namespace
Columbia University Libraries' digital collections platform and the resolution target for Columbia's own DOI namespace. Columbia is a registered DataCite repository client (CUL....
IRI/LDEO Climate Data Library
The Climate Data Library run by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, both Columbia University units. A long-run...
CourseWorks (Instructure Canvas)
Columbia's learning management system. The REST API is live and returns a well-structured JSON 401 to unauthenticated callers, and the LTI 1.3 tool-platform JWKS is publicly rea...
Columbia University Data Platform (Redivis)
Columbia's research data platform runs on Redivis as an institution-specific tenancy, and the university has registered two distinct DataCite repository clients against it — CUL...
Columbia University Locations API
Library locations and their posted opening hours.
Scroll within the panel for all 10 ·
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.
Rate 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.
Columbia 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.
Columbia 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.
Columbia Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 1
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.
Columbia University API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 1
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.
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.
Scroll 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.
Scopes 1
OAuth scopes are the vocabulary of least-privilege access. Profiling them shows exactly what an integration — or an agent acting on a user's behalf — is allowed to do.
OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Columbia 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.
Get Started 1
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 2
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 6
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 4
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 4
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Learn 1
Tutorials, courses, talks, and written guidance
Operate 1
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 2
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
The organization behind the API
Other 4
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/columbia · machine-readable index on apis.io
This is an independent, third-party profile of Columbia 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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