Lancaster University
Lancaster University is a collegiate public research university in Lancaster, United Kingdom, a member of the N8 Research Partnership and, at the time of writing, not a Russell Group member. It operates no central developer portal, no API gateway, no API key programme and no published API programme, and this profile records that plainly. What it does operate, on hosts it owns, is a small but genuine set of machine-readable surfaces: the Lancaster EPrints institutional repository answers a complete, unauthenticated OAI-PMH 2.0 interface at eprints.lancs.ac.uk with seven metadata formats including RIOXX and uketd_dc, and Lancaster runs its own Shibboleth Identity Provider at idp.lancs.ac.uk, self-publishing SAML 2.0 metadata and registered with the UK Access Federation since 2014 and exported to eduGAIN. Both are institution-operated and both are recorded here as such. Two further surfaces look like Lancaster's and are not: the research directory at research.lancaster-university.uk CNAMEs to lancaster.elsevierpure.com and the OneSearch discovery layer CNAMEs to lancaster.primo.exlibrisgroup.com, so Elsevier Pure and Ex Libris Primo VE wrote those contracts, not Lancaster — they are recorded as tenant relationships and their specifications are deliberately not saved under this slug. Lancaster's most substantial public engineering output is not an API at all: the github.com/lancaster-university organisation is where the BBC micro:bit runtime (microbit-dal) and its successor CODAL were written, and github.com/lulibrary holds the University Library's own open-source Alma, Pure and research-data tooling.
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 Lancaster University the way a machine reads it — 22 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 — Lancaster University scores 46.2/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 23/100 (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 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0
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</a>More shapes, themes and sizes → · Score as JSON · How badges work
How we profile Lancaster University
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Lancaster 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 5
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.
Lancaster EPrints OAI-PMH 2.0 Interface
The one unambiguous, institution-operated public API Lancaster runs. A single HTTP endpoint that dispatches on the OAI-PMH `verb` parameter and returns OAI-PMH 2.0 XML envelopes...
Lancaster Shibboleth Identity Provider (SAML 2.0 metadata)
Lancaster operates its own Shibboleth Identity Provider and self-publishes its SAML 2.0 EntityDescriptor at the canonical /idp/shibboleth location. The entity has been registere...
Lancaster Research Directory (Elsevier Pure) — tenant
Lancaster's research information system and public research directory. The data — outputs, people, projects, impact — is Lancaster's; the platform and the contract are Elsevier'...
Lancaster Library Discovery and Services (Ex Libris Alma / Primo VE) — tenant
Lancaster University Library runs on the Ex Libris platform: Primo VE for discovery (OneSearch, view identifier 44LAN_INST:LUL_VU1) and Alma for the library services platform be...
Lancaster Library Alma Webhook Handler (open source)
An AWS serverless application written and maintained by Lancaster University Library that listens for Ex Libris Alma webhook events and forwards them to backend SNS topics. It i...
Open Collections 2
Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
API Collection
OPEN COLLECTIONLancaster EPrints OAI-PMH 2.0 Interface Oai2 API
OPEN COLLECTIONPricing 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.
Lancaster 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.
Lancaster 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.
Lancaster 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.
Lancaster University API Rules
SPECTRALLancaster University API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 2
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.
Lancaster EPrints OAI Identify
JSON SCHEMALancaster EPrints OAI Record
JSON SCHEMAJSON Structure 1
JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.
JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.
Lancaster Record Structure
JSON STRUCTUREExamples 2
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.
Lancaster Getrecord Example
EXAMPLELancaster Identify Example
EXAMPLESecurity Posture 3
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.
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 Lancaster 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 2
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 4
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 4
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 3
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 2
The organization behind the API
Other 7
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
Scroll within the panel for all 7 ·
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/lancaster · machine-readable index on apis.io
This is an independent, third-party profile of Lancaster 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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