swiss-academic-libraries-mcp

> 🇨🇭 **Part of the [Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio](https://github.com/malkreide)**

# 📚 swiss-academic-libraries-mcp

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> MCP server providing access to Swiss academic libraries — swisscovery, e-rara, e-periodica, e-manuscripta. No API key required.

[🇩🇪 Deutsche Version](README.de.md)

### Demo

![Demo: Claude using swisscovery_search and erara_list_records](docs/assets/demo.svg)

---

## Overview

**swiss-academic-libraries-mcp** connects AI models to the full Swiss academic library infrastructure via standardised, open protocols. It covers the [swisscovery](https://swisscovery.slsp.ch) union catalogue (500+ libraries, 10M+ records) and three digitalisation platforms: historical prints ([e-rara](https://www.e-rara.ch)), periodicals ([e-periodica](https://www.e-periodica.ch)) and manuscripts ([e-manuscripta](https://www.e-manuscripta.ch)).

All data sources use open, authentication-free protocols (SRU/MARC21, OAI-PMH/Dublin Core). The server supports both local use via Claude Desktop (stdio transport) and cloud deployment (Streamable HTTP).

Beyond the catalogue, the server also covers **Swiss open-access legal literature** — freely readable legal scholarship from [sui generis](https://sui-generis.ch), [ex/ante](https://ex-ante.ch) and [Repositorium.ch](https://www.repositorium.ch) — as **metadata** (title, authorship, year, licence, DOI, link), never full text.

It also adds the **international metadata layer**: DOI resolution and international research literature via [Crossref](https://www.crossref.org), and preprints via [arXiv](https://arxiv.org). This lets one conversation answer both *"is this held in Switzerland?"* (national layer) and *"what is this, and where else does it live?"* (international layer). Every resolved DOI returns title, ISSN, ISBN and authors as clean top-level fields, so you can pivot straight into swisscovery.

**Anchor demo query (national ↔ international):** *"Find the original publication for this DOI, check whether a preprint version exists, and show whether a Swiss library holds it."* → `resolve_doi` → `search_preprints` → `swisscovery_search(query="<ISSN from resolve_doi>")`.

**Anchor demo query (catalogue):** *"Which Swiss university dissertations on primary school pedagogy are held in Swiss libraries, and are any of them digitised in e-rara?"*

**Anchor demo query (OA legal literature):** *"Which freely accessible legal-scholarship articles exist on data protection in education? Give me title, authorship, year, licence and DOI."* → `oa_law_search(query="Datenschutz im Bildungsbereich")` — results are ranked by relevance: articles matching **all** terms rank first, articles matching only the core term (`Datenschutz`) follow, so the query returns the real privacy-law corpus rather than an empty set.

---

## Features

- **16 tools** across 4 catalogue sources + 3 open-access legal-literature sources + 2 international metadata sources — all read-only, no API key required
- **swisscovery search** with full CQL syntax: full-text, title, author, subject, ISBN/ISSN
- **OAI-PMH harvesting** with date range and collection filters plus pagination via resumption tokens
- **MARC21 parser** extracting 20+ fields (title, creator, publication info, subjects, abstract, URLs)
- **Dublin Core parser** for all three digitalisation portals
- **Dual transport**: stdio for Claude Desktop · Streamable HTTP for cloud/self-hosted deployments
- **OA legal-literature search** across sui generis, ex/ante and Repositorium.ch with a declarative source registry (new sources = one config entry), best-effort Crossref licence enrichment, and graceful per-source degradation
- **International metadata layer**: DOI resolution and bibliographic search via Crossref (polite pool via `CROSSREF_MAILTO`), preprint search via arXiv with automatic phrase quoting and request throttling — clean title/ISSN/ISBN/author fields for pivoting into swisscovery
- **3 built-in prompts**: `research-workflow`, `education-research` and `doi-to-swiss-shelf`
- **Markdown and JSON output** for all tools
- **97 unit/mocked tests** (no network) + 30 live smoke tests

---

## Data Sources

| Source | Protocol | Content | Records |
|--------|----------|---------|---------|
| [swisscovery (SLSP)](https://swisscovery.slsp.ch) | SRU / MARC21 | 500+ Swiss libraries | 10M+ |
| [e-rara](https://www.e-rara.ch) | OAI-PMH / Dublin Core | Digitised historical prints | 250k+ |
| [e-periodica](https://www.e-periodica.ch) | OAI-PMH / Dublin Core | Digitised periodicals (1750–today) | 1M+ articles |
| [e-manuscripta](https://www.e-manuscripta.ch) | OAI-PMH / Dublin Core | Manuscripts & archival material | 100k+ |

### Open-Access legal literature (metadata only)

| Source | Protocol | Content | DOI coverage |
|--------|----------|---------|--------------|
| [sui generis](https://sui-generis.ch) | OAI-PMH / Dublin Core | OA legal journal & non-profit publisher | ~100 % (`10.21257/…`) |
| [ex/ante](https://ex-ante.ch) | OAI-PMH / Dublin Core | Peer-reviewed journal for (young) legal scholarship, multilingual | none (persistent URL) |
| [Repositorium.ch](https://www.repositorium.ch) | Supabase / PostgREST (JSON) | Subject repository for Swiss law | partial |

### International metadata layer (metadata only)

| Source | Protocol | Content | Licence |
|--------|----------|---------|---------|
| [Crossref](https://www.crossref.org) | REST / JSON | DOI resolution + international research literature | Metadata CC0 1.0 (public domain) |
| [arXiv](https://arxiv.org) | Atom / XML | Preprints (CS, physics, maths, stats, …) | Metadata CC0 1.0; preprints per author licence |

---

## Tools

| Tool | Source | Function |
|------|--------|----------|
| `library_info` | — | Entry point: overview of all sources and tools |
| `swisscovery_search` | swisscovery | Full-text / CQL search across the union catalogue |
| `swisscovery_get_record` | swisscovery | Single record by MMS-ID |
| `erara_list_records` | e-rara | Prints filtered by date / collection |
| `erara_get_record` | e-rara | Single item by OAI identifier |
| `erara_list_collections` | e-rara | All participating libraries |
| `eperiodica_list_records` | e-periodica | Articles filtered by date |
| `eperiodica_get_record` | e-periodica | Single article by OAI identifier |
| `emanuscripta_list_records` | e-manuscripta | Manuscripts filtered by date / collection |
| `emanuscripta_get_record` | e-manuscripta | Single object by OAI identifier |
| `emanuscripta_list_collections` | e-manuscripta | All archives / collections |
| `oa_law_search` | OA legal (all 3) | Search OA legal scholarship (title/abstract/author) with source, language, year and peer-review filters |
| `oa_law_get` | OA legal (all 3) | Single OA legal article by DOI or resolvable URL |
| `resolve_doi` | Crossref | Resolve a DOI to full metadata (title/ISSN/ISBN/authors → pivot into swisscovery) |
| `search_publications` | Crossref | Search international research literature; every hit carries a DOI |
| `search_preprints` | arXiv | Search preprints with automatic phrase quoting; linked journal DOIs bridge to `resolve_doi` |

### Example Use Cases

| Query | Tool |
|-------|------|
| *"Which books about Swiss primary schools are held in Swiss libraries?"* | `swisscovery_search` |
| *"Show digitised historical works from ETH Library"* | `erara_list_records` |
| *"Which Swiss periodicals were digitised in 2023?"* | `eperiodica_list_records` |
| *"What manuscript collections does e-manuscripta hold?"* | `emanuscripta_list_collections` |
| *"Which OA legal articles exist on facial recognition?"* | `oa_law_search` |
| *"Resolve DOI 10.1038/nature14539 and give me its ISSN"* | `resolve_doi` |
| *"Find recent preprints on model context protocol"* | `search_preprints` |
| *"Find this paper's DOI, check for a preprint, and see if a Swiss library holds it"* | `resolve_doi` → `search_preprints` → `swisscovery_search` |

---

## Architecture

Three independent paths share one HTTP client (retry with exponential backoff, shared connection pool, project `User-Agent`):

```
                    ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                    │            swiss-academic-libraries-mcp               │
                    │            (FastMCP · stdio / HTTP)                   │
                    └────────┬───────────────┬────────────────┬────────────┘
                             │               │                │
          ┌── CATALOGUE ─────┘   ┌── OA-LEGAL ┘     ┌── INTERNATIONAL ──┐
          │   (api_client.py)    │   (oa_legal.py)  │  (intl_metadata.py)│
          │                      │                  │                    │
 ┌────────┴────────┐   ┌─────────┴──────────┐   ┌───┴──────────────────┐ │
 │ swisscovery SRU │   │ source registry     │   │ Crossref  REST/JSON  │ │
 │ e-rara      OAI │   │  ├ sui generis  OAI │   │  ├ resolve_doi        │ │
 │ e-periodica OAI │   │  ├ ex/ante      OAI │   │  └ search_publications│ │
 │ e-manuscripta   │   │  └ Repositorium REST│   │ arXiv     Atom/XML   │ │
 └────────┬────────┘   │ harvest→cache→filter│   │  └ search_preprints   │ │
          │            │ Crossref licence ⟳  │   │ (phrase-quote+throttle)│ │
 MARC21 / Dublin Core  └─────────┬──────────┘   └───┬──────────────────┘ │
 → catalogue records