In previous posts we started with the URLs for particular online resources (books, collections, etc.) without worrying about where those URLs came from. Here we will use a variety of tools for locating primary and secondary sources of interest and keeping track of what we find. We will be focusing on the use of web services (also known as APIs or application programming interfaces). These are online servers that respond to HTTP queries by sending back text, usually marked up with human- and machine-readable metadata in the form of XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Since we’ve already used xmlstarlet to parse XML, we’ll get various web services to send us XML-formatted material.