Use the Index Herbariorum API to download data into a simple pandas dataframe

ih-download.py

import pandas as pd
from pandas.io.json import json_normalize
import requests
# IH API documented here: https://github.com/nybgvh/IH-API/wiki
url='http://sweetgum.nybg.org/science/api/v1/institutions'

def main():
    response = requests.get(url)
    results = response.json()
    # The JSON format record for an IH record has nested sections - the 
    # call to json_normalize flattens these: 
    df = pd.DataFrame(json_normalize(results['data']))
    # Now have a pandas dataframe holding all the IH data:
    print(df[['irn','organization','location.lat','location.lon']].head(n=50))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()