From the webpage:
APIs, short for application programming interface, are tools used to share content and data between software applications. APIs are used in a variety of contexts, but some examples include embedding content from one website into another, dynamically posting content from one application to display in another application, or extracting data from a database in a more programmatic way than a regular user interface might allow.
Many scholarly publishers, databases, and products offer APIs to allow users with programming skills to more powerfully extract data to serve a variety of research purposes. With an API, users might create programmatic searches of a citation database, extract statistical data, or dynamically query and post blog content.
Below is a list of commonly used scholarly resources at MIT that make their APIs available for use. If you have programming skills and would like to use APIs in your research, use the table below to get an overview of some available APIs.
If you have any questions or know of an API you would like to see include in this list, please contact Mark Clemente, Library Fellow for Scholarly Publishing and Licensing in the MIT Libraries (contact information at the bottom of this page).
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A nice listing of scholarly resources with public APIs and your opportunity to contribute back to this listing with APIs that you discover.
Sadly, as far as I know (subject to your corrections), the ACM Digital Library has no public API.
Not all that surprising considering considering the other shortcomings of the ACM Digital Library interface. For example, you can only save items (their citations) to a binder one item at a time. Customer service will opine they have had this request before but no, you can’t contact the committee that makes decisions about Digital Library features. Nor will they tell you who is on that committee. Sounds like the current Whitehouse doesn’t it?
I first saw this in a tweet by Scott Chamberlain.