By The Genecology Project, and other computational HPS projects at ASU, rely on the ASU Digital HPS Community Repository for storing a variety of data and products. An important part of the development process for the repository was producing a REST API that could provide reliable and programmatic access to deposited materials. Since the built-in DSpace REST API didn't quite have all of the functions that we needed (e.g. it didn't have a reliable authentication mechanism, and it ignored access restrictions), we collaborated with programmers at the Marine Biological Laboratory to develop a new API (available here). Since the analysis process in most of our computational projects takes place in a Python environment, we had to develop some simple methods for pulling material from the repository via the API.
A Python class for interacting with our custom DSpace API is available here, and documentation is available here. This is a work in progress, but may be useful for others who adopt similar infrastructure for their digital projects, or who wish to interact with the ASU Digital HPS Community Repository.