Electronic Course Reserves Unleashed (ECRU)

ECRU (Electronic Course Reserves Unleashed) is an API for searching an index of the Library Course Reserves database, The database itself is maintained by reserves librarians who use the Library Reserves Tool or the Canvas Library Reserves Tool to create, revise, update, and delete reserves requests for specific courses.

The ECRU data base contains records of two types:

• course -- a description of a course offered in a particular term
• reading -- corresponds to one bibliographic item placed on reserve for a particular course

The best documentation for using ECRU can be found on the GitHub open source pages. See the links below for more information

ECRU URL Patterns

An example URL that looks up all reserves readings containing the word "thomas" is:

http://webservices.lib.harvard.edu/ecru/v2/readings?q=thomas

More information on API patterns can be found at

https://github.com/harvard-library/ecru/blob/master/ecru_url_patterns.md

ECRU Data Model

An overview of the ECRU data mode can be found at

https://github.com/harvard-library/ecru/blob/master/UsingCourseReservesUnleashed.md