@pipeworx/dpla

The Digital Public Library of America — ~50 million digitised items aggregated from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian, HathiTrust, Internet Archive and hundreds of state libraries, universities and historical societies, searchable in one query.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Tools

• dpla_search_items(...) — search by free text, title, creator, contributing hub, subject, type, named collection or date range.

• dpla_item(id) — one record in full, including the raw source metadata as the contributing institution wrote it.

• dpla_collections(q | title) — which named collections inside contributing institutions hold matching material, with an item count each.

Related MCP server: mcp-smithsonian

Auth

Platform-backed since 2026-09-18: PLATFORM_DPLA_KEY lives in the encrypted platform_keys table (no Cloudflare binding) and platformKeyEnv is declared in workers/gateway/src/pack-manifest.json, so callers need nothing. Pass your own key as _apiKey to use it instead.

The key is free, instant and self-service — no approval, no plan, no payment:

curl -XPOST https://api.dp.la/v2/api_key/<your-email>

DPLA emails the key within a minute or two.

Verify the platform key is really set with curl -s https://gateway.pipeworx.io/manifest.json → dpla.platform_key_set, never from a file on a laptop.

Data sources

• https://api.dp.la/v2/items — item search; dpla_collections is the sourceResource.collection.title facet of this same endpoint.

• https://api.dp.la/v2/items/{id} — one record.

Notes the next person would otherwise rediscover:

• /v2/collections no longer exists (fleet #2249, 2026-09-18). DPLA's API serves exactly three routes — GET /v2/items, GET /v2/items/{id}, POST /v2/api_key/{email} (their source: github.com/dpla/dpla-api, src/index.ts). api.dp.la/v2/collections answers 404 The requested resource could not be found to a valid key, the same body it gives no key at all. An earlier version of this pack read that 404 as "bad key" because it had only ever been run without a working one. Named collections now surface only as the sourceResource.collection.title facet on the items search (facets=sourceResource.collection.title, facet_size up to 2,000), which is what dpla_collections is built on.

• A 404 from DPLA is never a key problem. A missing key and a wrong key give the identical 403 and the identical body ({"error":"invalid_api_key","message":"Invalid or inactive API key."}), checked before any other parameter is validated. So a 403 says nothing about whether the rest of the query was well formed, and a 404 says the path is gone, not that the key is. Verify a key by calling /v2/items with it, not by reading an error.

• page_size=0 does not suppress docs — it falls through to DPLA's default page — so dpla_collections asks for one doc and ignores it.

• Filters are dotted paths into the record, not flat names: sourceResource.title, sourceResource.creator, provider.name, sourceResource.subject.name, sourceResource.collection.title, sourceResource.date.after.

• Fields are a string in one contributor's records and an array in another's — DPLA aggregates metadata written by hundreds of separate institutions and does not normalise cardinality. list()/one() in the pack handle both; anything reading d.sourceResource.creator[0] directly will break on some contributors. sourceResource.collection is an object with title (not name), so it has its own collectionTitles() reader.

• isShownAt is the object on the holding institution's own site; DPLA holds the description, the institution holds the object.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dpla": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/dpla/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/dpla/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1679+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/dpla_search_items \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"q":"Dust Bowl","limit":10}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/dpla_search_items. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dpla": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-dpla"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-dpla

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Dpla data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT