Command-line tool and TypeScript library

`ddb`

Search Germany’s digitised cultural heritage from your terminal. ddb is a command-line tool over the v2 Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek API: tens of millions of objects from German archives, libraries, museums and research institutions — searchable, faceted, and returned as clean JSON you can pipe straight into jq.

Version 0.0.5 npm GitHub API reference

Install

Needs Node.js 20 or newer. Installs the ddb command:

npm i -g @maschinenlesbar.org/deutsche-digitale-bibliothek-cli

Access

No account, no API key, no configuration — install and query.

Quick start

# Search objects matching a keyword (10 results by default)
ddb search Goethe

# How many objects match in total?
ddb search Goethe | jq '.response.numFound'

# Narrow to images in Berlin, and count the type distribution
ddb search Goethe --filter 'place_fct:"Berlin"' --filter type_fct:mediatype_002 --facet objecttype_fct

# Grab an object id from a result, then fetch its detail
ddb search Goethe --fields id | jq -r '.response.docs[0].id'
ddb item TNPFDKO2VDGBZ72RWC6RKDNZYZQZP3XK

Commands

search

Search cultural-heritage objects via the v2 Solr index (returns native Solr JSON)
item

Fetch one item component by its 32-character id (GET /2/items/{id})
version

Print the DDB backend version — a quick connectivity check (no key needed)

All commands, arguments and options →

Claude Code skills

The ddb plugin teaches Claude to use ddb. Install it from the maschinenlesbar.org marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add maschinenlesbar-org/plugins
/plugin install ddb@maschinenlesbar

/ddb:ddb-item
/ddb:ddb-search

What the skills answer, with real examples → Skill descriptions and requirements →

TypeScript library

@maschinenlesbar.org/deutsche-digitale-bibliothek-cli is also a typed API client you can import in your own code, with no runtime HTTP dependencies.

API reference → Library usage and architecture →

The tool, not the data

The data comes from the provider behind the API, under its own terms — see DATA_LICENSE.md. The code is dual-licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later or commercial — see LICENSING.md.