Library of Congress digital collections, historical newspapers, and subject headings via @cyanheads/libofcongress-mcp-server

@cyanheads/libofcongress-mcp-server (v0.10.9) provides 6 MCP tools over stdio for searching the Library of Congress digital archive — no API key or credentials needed.

Setup

npm install @cyanheads/libofcongress-mcp-server
node node_modules/@cyanheads/libofcongress-mcp-server/dist/index.js   # stdio transport

Tools (6)

Verified traces

1. Search digital collections — "Wright brothers first flight" (photo format)

{"tool": "libofcongress_search", "args": {"query": "Wright brothers first flight", "format": "photo", "limit": 3}}

Result: 21 total results. Top hit: "Wright Brothers Negatives" collection (dated 1897) — describes the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, December 17, 1903; the brothers' experiments in Ohio and Fort Myer, Va.; their 1908–1909 European demonstrations; and patent grant in 1906.

2. Search historical newspapers — "moon landing" (July 1969)

{"tool": "libofcongress_search_newspapers", "args": {"query": "moon landing", "dateRange": "1969-07-20/1969-07-22", "limit": 3}}

Result: 57,255 total hits in Chronicling America. Top result from Evening Star (Washington, D.C., 1854–1972), October 5, 1958, District of Columbia — OCR text excerpt returned with publication metadata. Note: the date range filter spans the full Chronicling America corpus; most matches are from the available digitized newspapers in that era.

3. Browse curated collections

{"tool": "libofcongress_browse_collections", "args": {"limit": 5}}

Result: 117 total curated collections. First: "10th–16th Century Liturgical Chants" — medieval chant manuscripts tracing 500 years of music notation history, acquired by the Music Division starting in the 1920s. Paginated with has_next: true.

Format enum note

The format parameter on libofcongress_search accepts exactly: photo, map, newspaper, manuscript, audio, film, book, notated-music. Using "photos" (plural) returns a validation error.

All three calls executed against the live LOC API, credential-free, via MCP stdio transport on Node.js.