smeet666/mcp-libraryofcongress

The Library of Congress is the national library of the
United States, and it publishes a large part of its holdings online: books,
photographs, maps, sound recordings, manuscripts, and the pages of American
newspapers going back to the eighteenth century. The newspaper pages have been
scanned and run through optical character recognition, so the words printed on
them can be searched. Curators also gather material into digital collections,
each described and published as a body of its own.
This server connects a chat client to that library. You can search the words
printed inside the newspapers, search the catalogue by title, creator, subject,
place or language, read one record with its rights statement and where the
original is held, and list the digital collections. 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
www.loc.gov and chroniclingamerica.loc.gov, and nothing else: no volume, no
port, no credential.
Bundle, without npm
Download mcp-libraryofcongress-3.0.2.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
- "What did Oklahoma newspapers write about the 1907 statehood vote?"
- "Find me photographs of Chicago tenements before 1920."
- "Read that record and tell me who holds the original."
- "What digital collections are there on the Civil War?"
- "Can I reuse that photograph?"
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_newspapers | Searches the words printed inside scanned newspaper pages. |
| search_items | Searches the catalogue by title, creator, subject, place or language. |
| get_item | Reads one record, its rights and where the original is held. |
| list_collections | Lists the digital collections curators published. |
search_newspapers
Searches the text of scanned newspaper pages, which came off the page through
optical character recognition.
| Argument | Type | Required | What it does |
| ------------------------ | ---------------------------------- | -------- | ----------------------------------- |
| query | string, 1 to 300 characters | yes | The words to look for on the pages. |
| location | string, up to 120 characters | no | A place the paper was published in. |
| publication | string, up to 200 characters | no | One newspaper. |
| year_from | integer, 1000 to 9999 | no | Earliest year, inclusive. |
| year_to | integer, 1000 to 9999 | no | Latest year, inclusive. |
| limit | integer, 1 to 25, 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 page. |
**In return:** hits, each carrying identifier, which get_item takes;
title; creator, which is the library that contributed the scan; year;
page_number, the leaf within the issue; published_on; publication with the
years the paper ran; state; excerpts; and excerpt_kind.
**excerpt_kind decides what an excerpt is worth.** A passage is the text
around the words that matched, centred on them. A page_opening is the start of
the leaf, sent because the text the Library returned with the row stops before
those words appear: it does not carry the match, so quoting it quotes something
else, and source_url opens the leaf with the query applied. **total counts
newspaper leaves, and it pages:** it is never a count of how many times the words
occur.
search_items
Searches the catalogue, one kind of thing at a time.
| Argument | Type | Required | What it does |
| ------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | -------- | ----------------------------------------------- |
| query | string, 1 to 300 characters | yes | Words to look for. |
| media_type | books, photos, maps, audio, manuscripts or newspapers | no | The catalogue to read. |