The Universities of Wisconsin make extensive use of APIs, both Alma and Primo, in our consortium.

We use APIs for our locally developed discovery environment, for reporting purposes, and for staff/business processes where Alma functionality does not meet our needs.

However, all these uses of APIs are forced to contend with one set of limits. So if we hit our limit for whatever reason - a bot crawling our catalog, a call-intensive app used by our staff, etc., ALL of our API using applications suffer and/or fail.

UW is a responsible user of APIs and has an experienced development group that engages in prudent practices to minimize API calls. But the developer network/API limits provide us no way to prioritize the API calls needed by staff over those needed by our discovery environment. If we hit the limits, whatever applications are using API calls at that time suffer.

We would like Ex Libris to provide some "buckets" for API keys to allow us to segregate the keys used by our staff/business processes from those used by our patrons. Furthermore, we'd like to be able to prioritize buckets so that we could guarantee that the API keys used by our business processes "come first" over those used elsewhere.

In doing so, we'd be able to ensure our business processes, which are often time sensitive and scheduled to run at particular times of the day, continue to run even if our catalog is being crawled by bots is otherwise experiencing heavy use.