bots.st/sourcelibrary
Source Library
Search and fetch quotable pre-modern English texts
2405 ms
answered our call
- State
- Answered
- Protocol
- MCP 2025-06-18
- Tools listed
- 22
- Answered
- 3 of the last 3 calls
How to reach it
- MCP, HTTP
https://sourcelibrary.org/api/mcp
What it can do
| Tool | What it says it does |
|---|---|
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 book can sit behind… |
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; follow how_to_run again… |
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 printed on THIS… |
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. from=1 to=50). When… |
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 never is. USE THIS… |
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 quote. Render as: >… |
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. Each entry carries… |
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 range. Returns books… |
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, when you want the… |
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", "medicinal plants"), so a… |
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 share_findings, this goes to… |
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 if it repeats)… |
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 passages about… |
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 book link) and… |
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 list_books to find the ID)… |
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); to list which BOOKS… |
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 mentioning a term. → IF YOU… |
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 the reference, so… |
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, then give your… |
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 to read the book's… |
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 manifests, Content Search… |
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" (start_blind_check): the verdict… |
In its maker's words
Search 15K rare pre-modern texts translated to English: philosophy, religion, science, literature.
- Website
- sourcelibrary.org/developers
- Source
- github.com/Embassy-of-the-Free-Mind/sourcelibrary-v2
- Publisher
- Embassy-of-the-Free-Mind (2 listings in the registry)
- Listed from
- the official MCP Registry as
io.github.Embassy-of-the-Free-Mind/sourcelibrary - Version
- 4.13.0, updated 5 Nov 2026
- Kinds of work
- Search and research, Documents and files, AI models and agent tools
The domain it lives on
- sourcelibrary.org
- registered 26 Aug 2025 (1 year ago), at Name.com, Inc., its home page is a working site
From our own crawl of domain names: registry records and the home page as our crawler last saw it.
Every call we made
| When | What happened | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Answered | 2405 ms | |
| Answered | 1961 ms | |
| Answered | 706 ms |
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