dhlab-mcp

MCP server providing access to DHLAB (National Library of Norway Digital Humanities Lab) functionality through the Model Context Protocol.

Overview

This server exposes tools for:

• Text search: Search the National Library's digital text collection

• NGram analysis: Analyze word frequency trends over time

• Concordance: Find word contexts in documents

• Collocations: Discover words that appear together

• Word lookup: Look up Norwegian word forms and lemmas

• Image search: Search for images in the digital collection

• Corpus statistics: Get information about document collections

Installation

This project uses uv, which can be installed with:

Clone and install:

Or install directly:

Usage

Configuring in Claude Code CLI

Add the MCP server to your Claude Code configuration:

or under user scope:

Verify the server is added:

The DHLAB tools will then be available in your Claude Code sessions.

Running the MCP Server Standalone

You can also run the server directly for testing:

Or in development mode:

Running as a Local HTTP API

To run the MCP server as a local HTTP API on a custom port:

The server supports the following transport options:

• stdio (default): Standard input/output for CLI integration

• http: Streamable HTTP transport (recommended for network access)

• sse: Server-Sent Events transport (legacy, for backward compatibility)

Once running, the HTTP server will be available at http://<host>:<port>/mcp/.

Available Tools

1. search_texts

Search for texts in the digital collection.

2. ngram_frequencies

Get word frequency trends over time.

3. find_concordances

Find word contexts in a document (returns HTML-formatted text).

Output format: HTML-formatted concordance with <b> tags highlighting matches.

4. word_concordance

Find word contexts with structured output (no HTML formatting).

Output format: Clean structured data with separate fields:

• dhlabid: Document identifier

• before: Text before the matched word

• target: The matched word itself

• after: Text after the matched word

Use cases:

• Use find_concordances for display/UI (HTML-formatted)

• Use word_concordance for analysis/processing (structured data)

5. find_collocations

Find words that appear near the target word.

6. lookup_word_forms

Look up different forms of a Norwegian word.

7. lookup_word_lemma

Look up the lemma (base form) of a word.

8. search_images

Search for images in the collection.

9. get_corpus_statistics

Get statistics about a set of documents.

Development

For development, install with:

Run tests:

Format code:

About DHLAB

DHLAB is a Python library for qualitative and quantitative analyses of digital texts from the National Library of Norway's collection. For more information, visit:

• DHLAB GitHub

• DHLAB Documentation

License

See LICENSE file.