Pennsylvania State University
Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) is a public, land-grant research university with its primary campus at University Park, PA, and is ranked #69 in the QS World University Rankings 2025. Its programmable footprint is real but narrow, and it lives almost entirely in University Libraries rather than in central IT. Penn State publishes two genuine first-party OpenAPI descriptions of services it builds and operates itself: the Researcher Metadata Database (RMD), the authority on faculty and research metadata, and ScholarSphere, its self-built institutional repository — both key-gated, both described in OpenAPI 3.0 by the Libraries team that wrote them. Alongside those it runs an open OAI-PMH 2.0 provider over the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive, an unauthenticated facilities API from the Office of Physical Plant (LionSpaceFIS), and its own Shibboleth identity provider registered in InCommon. Penn State also authors open-source identity software, including a SCIM 2.0 server implementation. What it no longer has is a central developer portal: docs.developer.psu.edu, which catalogued internal REST services such as PSU ID, Academic Course and Cornerstone behind WebAccess single sign-on, now redirects to sites.psu.edu and has been decommissioned. There is no unified API gateway, no shared credential, and no self-service onboarding — each surface issues its own key out of the unit that operates it.
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 Pennsylvania State University the way a machine reads it — 36 machine-readable artifacts across 3 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 — Pennsylvania State University scores 43.5/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 28/100 (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
Put this on your own site. The badge is drawn live from Pennsylvania State 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/pennsylvania-state-university/"
title="Pennsylvania State University on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/pennsylvania-state-university.svg"
alt="Pennsylvania State University Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="150" height="150" loading="lazy">
</a>[](https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/pennsylvania-state-university/)<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/pennsylvania-state-university/"
title="Pennsylvania State University on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/pennsylvania-state-university/card.svg"
alt="Pennsylvania State 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 Pennsylvania State University
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Pennsylvania State 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 9
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.
Researcher Metadata Database (RMD) API
Penn State University Libraries' faculty and research metadata service, built and run in-house with OSVPR and West Arete. Publishes cleaned researcher metadata — publications, g...
ScholarSphere API
Penn State's next-generation institutional repository, written by Penn State University Libraries and released under MIT — not a Figshare, Dataverse or DSpace tenancy. The API i...
ETDA OAI-PMH Provider
An open OAI-PMH 2.0 harvesting endpoint over Penn State's Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive, served by the Libraries' own etda_explore application on a psu.edu host. I...
Penn State Identity Federation (InCommon / Shibboleth)
Penn State operates its own Shibboleth identity provider and registers it in the InCommon federation under entityID urn:mace:incommon:psu.edu. Penn State SERVES ITS OWN SAML met...
Pennsylvania State University Buildings API
University buildings and their facility attributes. One tag of the Office of Physical Plant's single LionSpaceFIS service; the buildings, campuses, rooms, events and health entr...
Pennsylvania State University Campuses API
Penn State campus reference data, from the Office of Physical Plant LionSpaceFIS service.
Pennsylvania State University Events API
Change events for buildings and rooms, from the Office of Physical Plant LionSpaceFIS service.
Pennsylvania State University Health API
Service health and status for the LionSpaceFIS facilities service; returns appVersion and appStatus with a database connectivity check. Unauthenticated and live (appVersion 1.14...
Pennsylvania State University Rooms API
Rooms within buildings, from the Office of Physical Plant LionSpaceFIS service.
Scroll within the panel for all 9 ·
Open Collections 6
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 COLLECTIONLionSpaceFIS REST Buildings API
OPEN COLLECTIONLionSpaceFIS REST Buildings Campuses API
OPEN COLLECTIONLionSpaceFIS REST Buildings Events API
OPEN COLLECTIONLionSpaceFIS REST Buildings Health API
OPEN COLLECTIONLionSpaceFIS REST Buildings Rooms 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.
Pennsylvania State University 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.
Semantic 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.
Spectral 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.
JSON 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.
JSON Structure 2
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.
Pennsylvania State University Building Structure
JSON STRUCTUREPennsylvania State University Room Structure
JSON STRUCTUREExamples 6
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.
Security Posture 4
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 Pennsylvania State 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 2
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 3
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
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/pennsylvania-state-university · machine-readable index on apis.io
This is an independent, third-party profile of Pennsylvania State 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.
info@apievangelist.com
·
Read the full data-sourcing policy →
On a security or compliance team? Put security in the subject line and
you will get a person, not a form — we will tell you exactly which public URLs this profile was built from.