National Library of Norway
Search books, newspapers, journals, photos, maps, audiovisual media and digitized full text.
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All lookup operations
Open HTML operations for navigation. The JSON link for each operation is only for programmatic data access.
Building software or a dashboard? List operation names as JSON, then open the selected operation's descriptor before fetching data.
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search– Search the National Library's catalog - books, newspapers, journals, photos, maps, music, manuscripts, radio/TV and more, both physical and digitized. Digitized text (OCR) is matched too by default, so a query can surface newspaper or book pages that mention a term even when it's not in the title.
HTML GET template -
get_item– Get full catalog metadata for one item.
HTML GET template -
get_related_items– Get items related to one catalog item - e.g. the newspaper/journal a digitized article appeared in (hosts), articles/pages it contains (constituents), the previous/next issue in a run, or the series it belongs to. Most items (e.g. standalone books) have no recorded relations - an empty result is normal, not an error.
HTML GET template -
search_within_item– Full-text search inside the OCR'd pages of one specific digitized item (a book, one newspaper issue, a journal issue, etc.), returning which pages contain the term. Use this to jump straight to relevant pages of a long item instead of reading it page by page.
HTML GET template -
get_aggregations– Get facet counts for a query - e.g. how many matching items exist per year, county, media type or language. Useful for a quick overview before drilling into search() results, or for questions like "how many newspaper items mention X, broken down by year".
HTML GET template
Programmatic access
First confirm the operation and parameters in HTML, then use the read-only JSON API.
Does the client support MCP? Find the corresponding Allemannsdata server and registered tools.
How an AI agent should use this page
Ground rule: Navigate with HTML GET links to keep explanations and relationships. Use the page's JSON alternative only when concrete values must be extracted, compared or computed.
How to use National Library of Norway
Search books, newspapers, journals, photos, maps, audiovisual media and digitized full text. Choose a search lookup first when you lack an identifier; use a detail lookup when you already have a stable ID.
- Read requirements, cache time and known usage limits.
- Open the lookup and use the HTML GET template.
- Follow normalized result links onward; use JSON only for structured data work.
Related sources and scope
AI agent? Read the complete navigation and programming guide.