loc-mcp

A CLI and MCP server for the Library of Congress JSON API: newspapers, books and manuscripts, all full-text indexed and all resolvable to the individual page.

Keyless, no registration, no affiliation required.

Scope

Searches cover the whole of loc.gov by default. --collection <slug> narrows to one collection — chronicling-america for the historic newspapers, which is where the bulk of the transcribed text lives.

There is nothing special-cased about the newspapers. The dedicated chroniclingamerica.loc.gov API has been retired and that collection is now reachable only as one collection of loc.gov, so it is simply one value of --collection like any other.

Related MCP server: mcp-server-wayback

Install

uv tool install .

Commands

locgov search "<query>" [--pages N|N-M|all] [filters] [--json]
locgov snippets <reference> "<query>"   # the query in context on that page
locgov get <reference>                  # OCR text, prints path to the cached file

A reference is the loc.gov URL printed for each search result. It is both the citation link and the argument the other two commands take.

$ locgov search '"Brooklyn Bridge"' --collection chronicling-america \
    --from-year 1883 --to-year 1883 --per-page 2
# "Brooklyn Bridge" — 2363 results in chronicling-america, page 1 of 1182
[1] 1883-06-16  Image 2 of The Lincoln County leader (White Oaks, Lincoln County, N.M.), June 16, 1883
    the lincoln county leader (white oaks, lincoln county, n.m.) 1882-189? · p. 2 · english · new mexico
    https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn87090072/1883-06-16/ed-1/?sp=2

Note the nested quotes. '"Brooklyn Bridge"' is a phrase search; "Brooklyn Bridge" lets the shell strip the quotes and becomes an AND search, which on this same 1883 range reports 11,098 hits instead of 2,363.

Filters for search: --from-year, --to-year, --language, --state, --title, --collection, --level, --per-page, --sort.

--sort takes relevance (default), date_asc or date_desc.

Query syntax

Bare words are ANDed, and "quoted phrases" match exactly.

There is no boolean OR and no NOT. The words OR and NOT, a leading -, parentheses and | are all silently stripped from the query rather than rejected:

The last three are the same AND query. Each variant of a term therefore needs its own search, and a query written as (a OR b) quietly returns only pages holding both. This is the single most important thing to know before planning a sweep against this source.

Result totals are true counts

Unlike a relevance-ranked archive, loc.gov filters: the reported total is a real count of matching pages, so it can be quoted as one and --sort date_asc is safe on any query. The decade facet counts sum exactly to the reported total.

Pages, not documents

--level page is the default and resolves a hit to the individual page it sits on, for a book or a manuscript exactly as for a newspaper. That is what makes snippets and per-page text available. --level item returns whole documents instead; those have no snippet service, and get on one downloads the entire transcription in a single file.

Readability

By default search returns only material whose text can actually be retrieved (online-format:online text). A hit that cannot be read is of no use, so this is on unless you pass --include-unreadable, and anything unreadable that does slip through is flagged in the output.

Cost

Requests are paced at one every four seconds, shared across processes, so parallel callers share one budget. The Library publishes a limit of 20 requests per minute and blocks an offending IP for a full hour, which is what the conservative default is for. Override with LOC_MIN_REQUEST_INTERVAL only with reason.

Budget in requests: search is one request per result page (up to 150 results each), snippets and get are one request each after a one-off lookup per page that is then memoised on disk — and search seeds that memo for every result it returns. OCR downloads are cached under $XDG_CACHE_HOME/loc-mcp.

MCP server

uv run loc-mcp-install

Installs to Claude Code, Codex CLI and Gemini CLI. The CLI is the primary interface; the server exposes the same client.

License

Apache 2.0