libofcongress-mcp-server

How to connect

• libofcongress_search

  Search the Library of Congress digital collections by keyword. Optionally filter by material format (photos, maps, newspapers, audio, etc.), date range, subject heading, or geographic location. Returns item summaries with titles, dates, descriptions, LOC IDs, and format tags. Use libofcongress_get_item to retrieve full metadata for a specific result. Use libofcongress_search_subjects first to find the exact LCSH heading spelling before applying a subject filter.

• libofcongress_get_item

  Retrieve the full metadata record for a specific LOC digital item. Returns contributors, subjects, rights information, physical description, notes, related items, and links to digital resources (TIFF, JPEG, PDF) for items with digital surrogates. Use after libofcongress_search to get complete details on a result. Pass the bare item ID from the search result — do not include URL path segments.

• libofcongress_search_newspapers

  Search historical newspaper pages in the Chronicling America corpus. Returns matching pages with OCR text excerpts (~500 characters), publication title, date, state, and the page URL needed for libofcongress_get_newspaper_page. Filters by keyword, date range, US state, and newspaper title. The OCR excerpts are sufficient for relevance assessment — call libofcongress_get_newspaper_page with the returned url field to read the full page text. OCR quality varies: 19th-century and degraded materials

• libofcongress_get_newspaper_page

  Retrieve the full OCR text of a specific historical newspaper page along with publication metadata. Pass the url field from a libofcongress_search_newspapers result — do not construct this URL manually. OCR quality varies by digitization batch and era: 19th-century and degraded materials may contain fragmented text, garbled words, and line-break artifacts that are surfaced as-is. When a page exists but has no digitized text, ocr_available is false and ocr_text is empty — this is a data property,

• libofcongress_search_subjects

  Search Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) by keyword. Returns controlled-vocabulary subject labels and their URIs. Use the returned label as the subject filter in libofcongress_search — LCSH uses precise, standardized terms that differ from natural language (e.g., "World War, 1939-1945" not "World War II"; "Photography, Aerial" not "Aerial photography"). Running this tool before a subject-filtered libofcongress_search dramatically improves result quality.

• libofcongress_browse_collections

  List and browse Library of Congress curated digital collections. Returns collection names, descriptions, item counts, slugs, and URLs. Optionally filter by keyword. Collections are curated subsets of the digital holdings with specific focuses (e.g., "Civil War Glass Negatives", "Baseball Cards", "WPA Posters"). Use the returned URL to navigate directly to a collection on loc.gov.

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