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# Welcome!

The guide you are reading contains:

- a **[high-level introduction](./overview.md)** to the Fatcat catalog and
  software
- a bibliographic **[style guide](./style_guide.md)** for editors, also useful
  for understanding metadata found in the catalog
- technical details and guidance for use of the catalog's
  **[public REST API](./http_api.md)**, for developers building bots, services,
  or contributing to the server software
- **[policies and licensing details](./policies.md)** for all contributors and
  downstream users of the catalog

## What is Fatcat?

Fatcat is an open bibliographic catalog of written works.  The scope of works
is somewhat flexible, with a focus on published research outputs like journal
articles, pre-prints, and conference proceedings. Records are collaboratively
editable, versioned, available in bulk form, and include URL-agnostic
file-level metadata.

Both the Fatcat software and the metadata stored in the service are free (in
both the libre and gratis sense) for others to share, reuse, fork, or extend.
See [Policies](./policies.md) for licensing details, and
[Sources](./sources.md) for attribution of the foundational metadata corpuses
we build on top of.

Fatcat is currently used internally at the [Internet Archive][], but interested
folks are welcome to contribute to it's design and development, and we hope to
ultimately crowd-source corrections and additional to bibliographic metadata,
and receive direct automated feeds of new content.

You can contact the Archive by email at <webservices@archive.org>, or the author
directly at <bnewbold@archive.org>.

[Internet Archive]: https://archive.org