bltools

**Modern Async Downloader# British Library Tools (bltools)

A modern, asynchronous CLI tool for downloading high-resolution manuscripts from the British Library. Now with full IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) support.

Features

• Modern Architecture: Built with Typer, Pydantic (settings & models), and HTTPX.
• IIIF Support: Support for modern IIIF Collection/Manifest URLs.
• Asynchronous: Concurrent downloads with asyncio and httpx.
• Robust: Automatic retries with exponential backoff via tenacity.
• Rich UI: Interactive progress bars and beautiful logging via rich and structlog.
• 12-Factor Compliant: Configuration via environment variables.

Installation

uv tool install bltools
# or run directly
uv run bltools --help

Using pip

pip install .

Usage

The basic command to download a manuscript:

bltools download add_ms_19352

Options

• --config, -c: Path to custom config file (default: bl.conf)
• --output, -o: Override output directory (default: current directory or config setting)
• --range, -r: Specify a page range (e.g., 1-10)

Examples

Download pages 1 to 5 of a manuscript:

bltools download add_ms_19352 --range 1-5

Save to a specific directory:

bltools download add_ms_19352 --output ./downloads

Configuration

You can use a bl.conf YAML file to set defaults:

sleeptime: 0.0
basedir: "."
rangebegin: 1
rangeend: 259
baseurl: "http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Proxy.ashx?view="

Development

This project uses hatchling and uv.

1. Clone the repo
2. Install dependencies: uv sync
3. Run tests: uv run pytest
4. Lint: uv run ruff check .