smeet666/mcp-archiveorg

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library that keeps
what the world publishes: scanned books, films, recorded music, radio, software,
and the pages of the web itself, captured over and over since 1996 in the Wayback
Machine. Millions of its books and documents have been run through optical
character recognition, so the words inside them can be searched, and the Open
Library index beside it describes works, their editions and their subjects.
This server connects a chat client to that library. You can search the full text
inside its documents, search its catalogue of items, read one item's record and
its files, look up a book by subject, place, period or person, and read the web
as it stood on a given day. It needs no API key and no account.
_Version française_
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Install
**One-click install**
**Claude Code**
**Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any client using the standard config format**
Node 24 or later is required, and no environment variable has to be set.
With Docker
-i keeps stdin open, which is where the protocol travels, and -t is left out
because a TTY rewrites the stream. The container needs outbound HTTPS to
archive.org, web.archive.org and openlibrary.org, and nothing else: no
volume, no port, no credential.
Bundle, without npm
Download mcp-archiveorg-2.0.2.mcpb from
the latest release
and open it. A client that supports MCP bundles installs it on its own, with no
npm and no configuration file to edit. The bundle carries its dependencies, so
nothing is fetched at install time.
What you can ask
- "Which books mention the Beaumont light-house?"
- "Find me items about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake."
- "What files does that item hold, and what licence is it under?"
- "Find me books on beekeeping in France published before 1900."
- "What did that website look like in March 2001?"
The ordinary path runs from a search to a record: a row carries an identifier,
and get_item reads it.
Tools
| Tool | What it does |
| ---------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- |
| search_inside | Searches the words inside the archive's scanned documents. |
| search_items | Searches the catalogue by title, creator, subject and media type. |
| get_item | Reads one item's record, its files and its licence. |
| search_books | Finds books by subject, place, period, person, length or year. |
| list_snapshots | Lists the captures the Wayback Machine holds for an address. |
| get_snapshot | Reads one capture of an address, at or near a date. |
search_inside
Searches the text inside the archive's documents, which came off the page through
optical character recognition, so a passage carries the misreadings of that
process.
| Argument | Type | Required | What it does |
| ------------------------ | ---------------------------------- | -------- | -------------------------------------------- |
| query | string, 2 to 300 characters | yes | The phrase to look for inside the documents. |
| limit | integer, 1 to 50, default 10 | no | Matches to serve. |
| page | integer, 1 to 100, default 1 | no | Which page of matches. |
| max_excerpt_chars | integer, 80 to 1200, default 300 | no | How much of a passage to serve. |
| max_excerpts_per_match | integer, 1 to 10, default 3 | no | Passages served per matching document. |
**In return:** hits, each carrying identifier, which get_item takes;
title, creator and year; excerpts, the passages as a machine read them
off the page; matched_file, naming what actually holds the passage; and
source_url. inside_container is true when the item bundles several documents
and the passage sits in one of them, in which case the title, the creator and the
year belong to the container.
**total counts documents, and it pages.** It is a number of documents and the last page of a match set is shorter than the
first. **No page number is available:** the index reports where the text sits
inside the item, which is 1 on nearly every match, so nothing here states a
page of a book and no link claims one.
search_items
Searches the catalogue itself, across every kind of thing the archive holds.
| Argument | Type | Required | What it does |
| ------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------- | ----------------------------------- |
| query | string, 1 to 300 characters | yes | Words to look for in the catalogue. |
| media_type | texts, movies, audio, image, software, data or web | no | The kind of thing to keep. |
| year_from | integer, 1 to 2200 | no | Earliest year. |