drpwchen/ask-your-library

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Ask your own library — textbooks, guidelines, lecture notes and your notes — and get answers that cite the page. Local-first search hub with an MCP server for Claude Code and an Obsidian plugin.
Formerly vault-search.
Related tools: textbook-to-note and lecture-to-notes produce the corpora this searches; note-supplement merges new material into notes you found with it.
Three tools that turn your Obsidian vault into a semantically searchable, AI-chattable knowledge base — running entirely on your own machine. No cloud indexing, no notes leaving your computer for search, no per-query API bill for retrieval.
Built by a physician to study from a vault of thousands of clinical notes, but domain-agnostic: point it at any vault of markdown notes (research, law, engineering, a personal wiki) and it works.
### Two ways to use it (one shared index)
This repo ships two front-ends over the same local LanceDB index + retrieval core — use either or both:
vault-search-obsidian — the Obsidian plugin (Search / Related Notes / Chat in the sidebar), talking to a small local API server. → Quickstart
vault-search-mcp — an MCP server exposing the same search as tools (vault_search, vault_similar, vault_related, vault_stats, textbook_search, and lecture_search when a lecture corpus is configured) to Claude Code or any MCP client. No Obsidian required. → Quickstart
Both reuse the same server/ core (indexer · scoring · Personalized-PageRank · knowledge graph), so you index once and query from wherever you like.
## The three-piece set (三套組)
| Tool | What it does | Backed by |
| 🔍 Vault Search | Type a question in natural language (any language) and get the most semantically relevant note sections — not keyword matches. | LanceDB vector search + local embeddings |
| 🔗 Related Notes | A live sidebar that, as you read or select text, surfaces related notes you forgot you wrote — surfacing hidden links across your vault. | Same index, "find similar" mode |
| 💬 Vault Chat | Chat with your notes (RAG). Three modes: Vault (notes only, 100% local & free), Hybrid (notes + AI knowledge), Free (open chat + literature search). | Local LLM or your Claude subscription |
All three live in the Obsidian sidebar. The same index also exposes an MCP server, so coding agents like Claude Code can search your vault as a tool.
### Screenshots
| 🔍 Vault Search | 🔗 Related Notes |
| 💬 Vault Chat | 👁 Context preview |
## Why it exists
Built-in Obsidian search is lexical — it finds the words you typed. But you rarely remember the exact words in a note you wrote months ago. Semantic search finds notes by meaning: search "how to manage a flaccid bladder after spinal injury" and it finds your note titled Neurogenic Bladder even if those exact words never appear.
The design priority is local-first and private:
Embeddings run locally via Ollama (bge-m3, bilingual, CPU-friendly). Your note text is never sent anywhere to be indexed or searched.
Vault-mode chat is fully local and free — a local LLM answers using retrieved notes, zero tokens billed.
Hybrid/Free chat optionally shells out to the claude CLI so you can use a Claude subscription you already pay for, instead of wiring up (and paying per-token for) a raw API key.