alexandria-mcp
Server Configuration
Describes the environment variables required to run the server.
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| MCP_TRANSPORT | No | Transport protocol (stdio or http) |
Instructions
Guidance the server publishes about itself, which clients place ahead of the tool catalog so the model reads it before choosing anything.
This server publishes no instructions, or was last inspected before Glama recorded them.
Capabilities
Features and capabilities supported by this server
Protocol revision2025-11-25
| Capability | Details |
|---|---|
| tools | {
"listChanged": true
} |
| logging | {} |
| prompts | {
"listChanged": false
} |
| resources | {
"subscribe": false,
"listChanged": false
} |
| extensions | {
"io.modelcontextprotocol/ui": {}
} |
| experimental | {} |
Tools
Functions exposed to the LLM to take actions
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| pingA | Simple connectivity test. Returns a greeting to confirm the server is running. |
| search_textsA | Search 4.6 million classical philosophy and humanities texts from Archive.org. The collection contains public domain books (pre-1928) covering:
Texts are in original languages — primarily English, German, Latin, French, Italian, Greek, Russian. Queries in any language work due to multilingual embeddings. Args: query: What you are looking for, e.g. 'Nietzsche will to power eternal recurrence', 'Kantian categorical imperative duty ethics', 'Platonic theory of forms and the Good', 'Stoic virtue and the sage', 'Aristotle eudaimonia flourishing', 'Hegel dialectics spirit history', 'free will determinism compatibilism' author: Optional — filter results to a specific author/creator, e.g. 'Kant', 'Nietzsche', 'Aristotle'. Case-insensitive substring match. language: Optional — filter by language code, e.g. 'eng', 'ger', 'lat', 'fre', 'ita', 'gre', 'rus' limit: Number of results after reranking (default 5, max 20) Returns: List of relevant text excerpts with metadata, reranked by relevance. Each result includes rerank_score, vector_score, title, creator, date, language, subject and the full text chunk. |
| get_book_listA | List books in the Alexandria collection, optionally filtered by author, subject or language. Returns unique books (one entry per Archive.org identifier) with metadata. At least one filter parameter is recommended — without filters, results are arbitrary. Args: author: Filter by author/creator name, e.g. 'Kant', 'Nietzsche', 'Plato'. Case-insensitive substring match against the creator field. subject: Filter by subject keyword, e.g. 'ethics', 'logic', 'metaphysics'. Case-insensitive substring match against the subject field. language: Filter by language code, e.g. 'eng', 'ger', 'lat', 'fre', 'gre', 'rus'. limit: Maximum number of distinct books to return (default 20, max 100). Returns: List of books with title, creator, date, language, subject, identifier and total_chunks. |
Prompts
Interactive templates invoked by user choice
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| philosopher_analysis | Generate a prompt for deep analysis of a philosopher's key ideas. |
| topic_exploration | Generate a prompt for exploring a philosophical topic across multiple thinkers. |
| compare_philosophers | Generate a prompt for comparing two philosophers on a specific topic. |
Resources
Contextual data attached and managed by the client
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
No resources | |
TDQS
Scored across 3 tools
ping is clearly a health check, while search_texts and get_book_list serve distinct purposes: one returns text excerpts, the other lists book metadata. The overlap is minimal and the descriptions clearly differentiate them.
All tools use lowercase with underscores and follow a verb-based pattern (ping, search_texts, get_book_list). The pattern is consistent enough, though the noun structure varies slightly.
With 3 tools, the server is minimal but well-scoped for its search-focused purpose. ping is a standard utility, and the two search-related tools cover the core functionality without excess.
The server supports searching and listing books, but lacks operations like fetching a full text by identifier or retrieving detailed metadata for a single book. This leaves notable gaps for a library-like service.