Source Library
io.github.embassy-of-the-free-mind/sourcelibrarySearch 15K rare pre-modern texts translated to English: philosophy, religion, science, literature.
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Tools · 22
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…
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 …
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 wo…
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 yo…
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 …
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 …
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] ma…
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 st…
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_…
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 absen…
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 ar…
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 col…
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 vocabu…
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 — sev…
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, p…
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 fr…
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 sh…
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 previou…
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 USE…
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 …
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 fro…
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 …
Resources · 2
What the corpus holds, which search tool to reach for, how citation and provenance work, and the failure modes worth knowing before you spend calls. Read this first if you are doing sustained research…
https://sourcelibrary.org/llms.txt
UI resource rendered by MCP Apps-capable hosts as an in-chat image grid for search_images results. Not meant to be read as a document.
ui://source-library/gallery-viewer
How to use
Add to your Claude Desktop / Cursor / Cline MCP config:
{
"mcpServers": {
"source_library": {
"url": "https://sourcelibrary.org/api/mcp",
"transport": "streamable-http"
}
}
}