The internetarchive [1] python library that folks have already mentioned is pretty nice for working with IA collections.

For a small project I needed to download the metadata for a collection created by the National Agriculture Library, and write it out to the filesystem as JSON in a pairtree [2]. Perhaps it helps illustrate how to use it as a library as opposed to the command line?

    https://github.com/UMD-DCIC/seed-catalogs/blob/master/fetch.py <https://github.com/UMD-DCIC/seed-catalogs/blob/master/fetch.py>

//Ed

[1] https://internetarchive.readthedocs.io/ <https://internetarchive.readthedocs.io/>
[2] https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/Curation/PairTree <https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/Curation/PairTree> 

> On Sep 18, 2017, at 3:37 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Is there an Internet Archive API that will allow me to get the contents of a collection as a stream of data and not as a stream of HTML.
> 
> A cool collection of early English print materials is available at the following URL:
> 
>  https://archive.org/details/bplsceep
> 
> Each item is associated with an Internet Archive identifier. If I were able to easily extract these identifiers, then I would be more easily able to provide services based on the collection. But I’m lazy. I don’t want to read the HTML and scrape it accordingly. Ick! I’d rather be given the list of bibliographics in a more computer-friendly way.
> 
> Again, can I programmatically read the contents of a Internet Archive collection?
> 
> —
> Eric Morgan