Source Library

Reliability

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How to connect

Add it to any MCP client that supports remote servers.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "source-library": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://sourcelibrary.org/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}

22 tools

• search_library

  RETURNS A LIST OF BOOKS (works on a topic) — NOT passages. PICK THIS to discover which works exist on a subject. → For quotable text use search_translations (exact words) or search_concept (by meaning); if the user already named an author/work, call get_book directly (or…

• search_translations

  RETURNS QUOTABLE PASSAGES (page-level snippets + citation URLs), matched by KEYWORD/term. PICK THIS to find a quote or textual evidence on a topic across the whole library. → If the modern word won't literally appear in historical texts, use search_concept (matches by meaning)…

• search_concept

  RETURNS QUOTABLE PASSAGES matched by MEANING (cosine similarity on Gemini embeddings, 768d) — paraphrases and adjacent phrasings match even with zero keyword overlap. PICK THIS when the modern term won't literally appear in historical texts — e.g. "distributed cognition" maps to…

• search_within_book

  SEARCHES INSIDE ONE BOOK (requires book_id). PRIMARILY KEYWORD: it runs a lexical search over the book's pages plus a narrow scoped-semantic pass (top ~10), interleaved by relevance. PICK THIS when you know the wording you are looking for, or want every page of one book…

• list_books

  BROWSES/FILTERS THE CATALOG by metadata (canonical author via author_id, title/author/summary words via search, language, category, year range, translation recency) — no page-text matching. PICK THIS to see WHAT EXISTS by an author or in a tradition, or to enumerate a date…

• get_book

  READ PIPELINE step 1 — DISCOVER. START HERE for any named work or author. Returns the book's AI-generated summary, chapter list, edition metadata, DOI, page counts, IIIF manifest, and the cover image (inline, so you and the user can see the book). LANGUAGE: `language` is what is…

• get_book_text

  READ PIPELINE step 2 — READ. Read a book's text. Call get_book first (step 1) for the chapter list, then come here. Preferred: use the chapter param to read one chapter at a time (includes [Page N] markers for citation). Alternatively, use from/to for explicit page ranges (e.g…

• get_quote

  READ PIPELINE step 3 — CITE. Get the exact verbatim text of a single page plus its citation apparatus. ALWAYS use before putting text in quotation marks. The response headline is citation_link (the stable sourcelibrary.org/q/… shortlink) — present it to the user alongside the…

• list_editions

  Every edition of one work that the library holds — the other witnesses to the same text, across languages and centuries. Give it a book_id (easiest: the id of any edition you already found) or a work_id. USE THIS when a quotation needs checking against more than one witness…

• check_duplicate

  DOES THE LIBRARY HOLD THIS WORK? Call this BEFORE telling the user the library lacks a book, and before proposing one for acquisition. A miss from list_books or search_library is NOT evidence of absence: list_books matches words and search_library ranks by relevance, so a held…

• get_quotes

  READ PIPELINE step 3 — CITE, in batch. Get verbatim text + citation_link for SEVERAL pages of a single book in one round-trip, to assemble a multi-passage dossier. Specify either pages (an explicit array, e.g. [12, 40, 41]) or an inclusive from/to range. Max 25 pages per call…

• search_images

  Search 200,000+ historical illustrations, emblems, engravings, diagrams, AND 24,000+ artworks (paintings, prints, sculptures). Filter by type, subject, figure, symbol, year. Results interleave two collections: illustrations extracted from book pages (each with a page number and…

• list_image_facets

  List the legal values of search_images' type, subject, figure and symbol filters, with how many images carry each. Those filters are EXACT string matches on tags an AI extractor wrote, and each vocabulary runs to thousands of strings (e.g. "musical notes", "Jesus Christ"…

• submit_feedback

  Submit feedback, bug reports, or feature requests to the Source Library team. Before proposing NEW functionality, read https://sourcelibrary.org/llms.txt and https://sourcelibrary.org/developers — several past submissions proposed building things that already exist (IIIF…

• share_findings

  Share a research dossier back to the Source Library team — a title, an optional summary, and an ordered list of citations (the passages your thesis rests on). Each citation is a reference { book_id, page, note }, NOT copied text: the library re-renders the canonical quote from…

• propose_collection

  Propose a themed collection of books to the Source Library team — a title, a rationale (why these books belong together and what thread connects them), and an ordered list of book ids. Get book ids from search_library / list_books / get_book. Like submit_feedback and…

• start_review_shift

  Start a volunteer REVIEW SHIFT: the user lends their Claude (you) to Source Library to check one book, page by page, against its scans. Use when the user wants to help Source Library, says "start a shift" or "review pages", or asks how they can contribute. The user does NOT need…

• continue_review_shift

  Next page of the book being reviewed. Call it straight after finishing a page until the stretch the user chose is done, and again when they ask for more. Pass next.book and next.after from the previous page, and volunteer_code. Returns the same shape as start_review_shift…

• start_blind_check

  OPTIONAL lane, only for a user who reads the original language and asks to judge pages themselves: up to five random pages from different books, each with scan, transcription and English. Here the USER is the reviewer: ask for THEIR verdict first, before any opinion of yours…

• submit_page_review

  Record the verdict on one page of a shift. mode "book-run" (start_review_shift / continue_review_shift): the verdict and findings are YOURS, from reading the scan and both texts; set user_looked true if the user checked anything on the page themselves. mode "blind"…

• propose_correction

  During a review shift, propose a correction to a page's transcription (field "ocr") or English (field "translation"). A correction is a list of exact span edits: each "find" must be copied exactly from the text the shift returned and occur once on the page (add surrounding words…

• get_locus

  Turn a CANONICAL CITATION into the actual leaves that carry it. Aristotle is cited by Bekker number (1094a8, 1447a) and Plato by Stephanus number (Rep. 328b) — the references scholarship has used for centuries, which survive re-typesetting and are shareable in a way a scan page…

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