smeet666/mcp-books

Three great archives hold the scanned record of what was published, and each
describes it in its own words. The Internet Archive keeps
books, films, recordings and software deposited by anyone, and has run millions
of them through optical character recognition. The
Library of Congress publishes the national collections of
the United States, one catalogue per kind of material. data.bnf.fr
publishes the authority records of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which
describe works and the people who wrote them rather than copies.
This server reads all three with one question. You can search the words inside
the scanned documents, search the catalogues, and read one record in a single
shape whichever archive holds it. 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, openlibrary.org, www.loc.gov and data.bnf.fr, and nothing
else: no volume, no port, no credential.
Bundle, without npm
Download mcp-books-2.0.1.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 anything on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake."
- "Read me that record and tell me who holds the original."
- "What does the BnF have on that author?"
- "Search the photographs rather than the books."
An answer takes several seconds: three archives are asked, each at its own pace.
The three sources
| Source | Archive | What it describes |
| --------- | ------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------ |
| archive | the Internet Archive | deposited copies, of every kind |
| loc | the Library of Congress | the national collections, one catalogue per kind |
| bnf | the Bibliothèque nationale de France | works and the people who wrote them |
A row's id names its archive, so an identifier read from one answer goes back
to the right one. **Counts are never added across archives**, and an archive that
failed is reported as having failed rather than as having found nothing.
Tools
| Tool | What it does |
| --------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| search_inside | Searches the words inside the scanned documents. |
| search_items | Searches the catalogues by title, creator, subject or plain words. |
| get_item | Reads one record in a single shape, whichever archive holds it. |
search_inside
Searches the text inside the scanned documents, which came off the page through
optical character recognition.
| 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 25, default 3 | no | Matches to keep from each archive. |
| 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 2 | no | Passages served per matching document. |
| fan_out | boolean, default true | no | Ask every archive rather than stopping at the first that answers. |
| sources | array of source ids | no | Ask these archives alone. |
**In return:** hits, each carrying id, which get_item takes and which names
its archive; source and source_name; the archive's own identifier without
the prefix; title, creator and year; page_number where the archive states
one; excerpts; and excerpt_kind.
**excerpt_kind decides what an excerpt is worth.** A passage is the text
around the words that matched. A page_opening is the start of the page, sent
because the machine-read text the archive returned stops before those words
appear: it does not carry the match, so quoting it quotes something else. All the
excerpts of one match are of one kind.
search_items
Searches the catalogues.
| Argument | Type | Required | What it does |