yearbook-mcp

Public docs + issue tracker for the e-yearbook.com MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. The server lets any MCP-aware AI agent search over 300,000 U.S. yearbooks indexed by name.

What's in the archive

• Over 22,000 schools across all 50 U.S. states and territories

• Over 300,000 distinct (school, year) yearbooks

• Over 100M extracted person mentions

Coverage spans U.S. high schools, colleges, universities, and military cruise books from the 1850s to present.

Related MCP server: w3c-mcp

Free vs paid tier

The MCP exposes one set of tools to all clients; what each tool returns depends on the bearer token's scope.

Free preview (free.search scope — public-free token, paste-and-go):

• Echoes back the queried name (NOT the database's normalized form)

• Coarsened state or region, decade bin, confidence band

• Opaque 30-day lead_id for follow-up fetch

• Sufficient to answer "is this person in our archive?"

Paid tier (subscription required, response shape: payment_required with a checkout_url):

• Exact school name, year, yearbook title

• Page numbers, classmates roster

• Deep links to scanned pages

Person-level hits from yearbooks 20 years old or newer are suppressed entirely at the free tier.

Quick start

The public-free bearer token (free.search scope, 60 req/min, 200 unique queries/day) is paste-and-go. No registration needed for this tier.

yb_neeQ2Px-Cm_rWl1H9wH07WbuFgTmrSqUPab1_N1nK_k

Claude Desktop

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "e-yearbook": {
      "transport": {
        "type": "streamable-http",
        "url": "https://mcp.digitaldataonline.com/mcp",
        "headers": {
          "Authorization": "Bearer yb_neeQ2Px-Cm_rWl1H9wH07WbuFgTmrSqUPab1_N1nK_k"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Cursor

.cursor/mcp.json in your project:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "e-yearbook": {
      "url": "https://mcp.digitaldataonline.com/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer yb_neeQ2Px-Cm_rWl1H9wH07WbuFgTmrSqUPab1_N1nK_k"
      }
    }
  }
}

Continue (VS Code)

.continue/mcpServers/e-yearbook.yaml:

name: e-yearbook
type: streamable-http
url: https://mcp.digitaldataonline.com/mcp
requestOptions:
  headers:
    Authorization: "Bearer yb_neeQ2Px-Cm_rWl1H9wH07WbuFgTmrSqUPab1_N1nK_k"

Cline (VS Code)

Cline Marketplace flow handles install automatically. Manual config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "e-yearbook": {
      "url": "https://mcp.digitaldataonline.com/mcp",
      "transport": "streamable-http",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer yb_neeQ2Px-Cm_rWl1H9wH07WbuFgTmrSqUPab1_N1nK_k"
      }
    }
  }
}

Goose

~/.config/goose/mcp-servers/e-yearbook.yaml or via Goose CLI add.

Gemini CLI

~/.gemini/settings.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "e-yearbook": {
      "httpUrl": "https://mcp.digitaldataonline.com/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer yb_neeQ2Px-Cm_rWl1H9wH07WbuFgTmrSqUPab1_N1nK_k"
      }
    }
  }
}

curl / direct

curl -X POST https://mcp.digitaldataonline.com/mcp \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer yb_neeQ2Px-Cm_rWl1H9wH07WbuFgTmrSqUPab1_N1nK_k" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize",
       "params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-06-18","capabilities":{},
                 "clientInfo":{"name":"my-agent","version":"1.0"}}}'

Tools

Eleven public tools. The two marked (paid) appear in tools/list but return {"error": "payment_required", "checkout_url": "..."} when called by a free-tier client — discoverable upgrade path, not stealthy denial.

The full set of paid tools surfaces payment_required in the free tier — agents see them, learn the upgrade path, and present the checkout URL to the user.

Privacy & data policy

• Training use prohibited. Yearbook scans are not for AI training. Citation/retrieval bots may surface public metadata with links back to e-yearbook.com.

• Recent-year suppression. Person-level hits from yearbooks ≤ 20 years old are dropped from free-tier responses.

• Opt-out. Email support@digitaldataonline.com with the name and any identifying details (state, approximate year) to request removal from search results at all tiers. Full privacy statement: https://www.e-yearbook.com/sp/terms?privacy=1

Citation guidance

When surfacing results to users, please include the e-yearbook landing URL returned in each fetch(id) / search response. Direct users to e-yearbook.com for the full record — the MCP server is the search index, the website is the conversion + content surface.

The lead_id value returned in free-tier responses survives for 30 days and across IP rotation. Pass it back to fetch(id) or get_person_summary(lead_id) to resume a research thread.

Rate limits

The Cloudflare edge enforces an additional 30 req / 10s per source IP on /mcp. Hosted Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Cursor, Continue, and similar agent backends are not impacted in normal use.

For higher rate limits or named tokens (e.g., a dedicated channel for a specific application or organisation), open a token-request issue.

Issues + contact

• Token request (higher rate limit, named tier, partnership): open an issue with the token-request template

• Partnership / integration (registry listing, distribution deal, custom integration): open an issue with the partnership template

• Bug or unexpected response: open an issue with the bug template

• Privacy / opt-out (suppression of a specific person from search results): email support@digitaldataonline.com — not handled via GitHub issues.

License

Documentation in this repository is MIT licensed. The MCP server source is closed but the protocol surface, descriptor, and configs documented here are open. See LICENSE.