Andrew,
I'm not sure this is the same thing that you were told about, but what
I discovered for IA after Jonathan sent out his message is here:
http://www.archive.org/advancedsearch.php#col2

It is just a redirect to a search of a Solr index so it ought to be
easy for you to see what's going on. Do note that the address of the
Solr may change, so you'll want to use the bookmark link. You'll see
that changing the xmlsearch param from bookmark to Search bypasses the
bookmark page.

Using this you can find all collection identifiers and names as Alexis
points out.

Jason

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 4:27 PM, Andrew Nagy <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Excuse me if I am late to the game on this one - but at the Code4Lib conference either Brewster Kahle or Aaron Swartz spoke about an API to either the open library or the internet archive.  Is this available, or any plans to release this?  It seems like you are referring to some sort of API.
>
> Andrew
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
>> [Alexis Rossi]
>> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 10:58 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Internet Archive collection codes?
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> You can do a search for mediatype:collection to return results for all
>> 4200+ collections.
>>
>> We have a search interface that will return specific fields for this
>> query
>> in xml format, if you'd like, but I'll need to give you some
>> permissions
>> to access it.  Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to use that
>> ([log in to unmask]).
>>
>> Alexis
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> > Does anyone know where to get a list of Internet Archive collection
>> > codes and their human-displayable display labels?
>> >
>> > For instance:
>> > americana => "American Libraries"
>> > gutenberg => "Project Gutenberg"
>> > librivoxaudio => [hell if I know]
>> >
>> >
>> > Some of these I can 'scrape' from the quick search box popup on the
>> IA
>> > website. But their not all in there. And maybe there's a better place
>> to
>> > get these?
>> >
>> > Anyone know where the right place to ask this of the IA and/or IA
>> > developer community is?
>> >
>> > Jonathan
>> >
>