Swiss Academic Libraries MCP Server

🇨🇭 Part of the Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio

📚 swiss-academic-libraries-mcp

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

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version

Demo

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Overview

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

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, ex/ante and Repositorium.ch — as metadata (title, authorship, year, licence, DOI, link), never full text.

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.

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Features

• 13 tools across 4 catalogue sources + 3 open-access legal-literature 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
• 2 built-in prompts: research-workflow and education-research
• Markdown and JSON output for all tools
• 76 unit tests (no network) + 28 live smoke tests

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Data Sources

Open-Access legal literature (metadata only)

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Tools

Example Use Cases

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Architecture

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

                        ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                        │        swiss-academic-libraries-mcp          │
                        │        (FastMCP · stdio / HTTP)              │
                        └───────────────┬──────────────┬──────────────┘
                                        │              │
                ┌───── CATALOGUE path ──┘              └── OA-LEGAL path ─────┐
                │  (api_client.py)                        (oa_legal.py)       │
                │                                                             │
      ┌─────────┴─────────┐                        ┌────────────────────────┴───────────┐
      │ swisscovery  SRU  │                        │  declarative source registry        │
      │ e-rara       OAI  │                        │   ├─ sui generis   → OAI-PMH         │
      │ e-periodica  OAI  │                        │   ├─ ex/ante       → OAI-PMH         │
      │ e-manuscripta OAI │                        │   └─ Repositorium  → PostgREST/JSON  │
      └─────────┬─────────┘                        │  harvest → in-memory cache → filter │
                │                                   │  Crossref DOI→licence enrichment ⟳   │
        MARC21 / Dublin Core                        │  (best-effort, OA_LAW_CROSSREF_ENRICH)│
        → catalogue records                        └────────────────────┬────────────────┘
                                                       OaLegalPublication (metadata only,
                                                       licence never empty, no full text)

• Catalogue path returns bibliographic records (books, digitised prints, periodicals, manuscripts).
• OA-legal path harvests OA legal-scholarship metadata once, caches it in memory (small corpus), and filters locally — because OAI-PMH has no keyword search of its own. Adding a fourth OA source is a single registry entry, not new code.

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Licensing & Scope

This server is deliberately conservative about what it emits — a portfolio that treats governance as a feature cannot be careless here.

• Metadata, not full text. For OA legal literature the server returns title, authorship, year, licence, DOI/link and — where the source provides it as a metadatum — the abstract. It never ingests, stores, or outputs the article body. The full-text PDF path exposed by Repositorium.ch is intentionally not carried into any field.
• licence is always set. Open Access means free to read, not free to reuse. Licences range from CC0 and CC BY to CC BY-NC-ND, and some articles are simply "free to read" with no open licence at all. When no machine-readable licence is available, the field is "unknown" — never guessed, never omitted. The native OAI metadata of all three sources carries only copyright statements, so "unknown" is the default; a best-effort Crossref lookup upgrades it to the real CC licence where a DOI resolves (e.g. sui generis → CC BY-SA 4.0). Disable with OA_LAW_CROSSREF_ENRICH=0.
• Citation integrity. Every result carries a resolvable reference — a DOI where present, otherwise a persistent URL. No result is emitted without one. A fabricated citation in legal literature is worse than no citation, so the server prefers one hit fewer over one hit invented.
• Language is carried, never silently filtered. ex/ante and Repositorium.ch are multilingual (DE/FR/IT/EN). The language field is always populated, but results are only filtered by language when you explicitly ask — otherwise half the Romandie would vanish from the results.
• Scope boundary. OA legal literature belongs here because it is the same capability already in this server — authentication-free bibliographic-metadata harvesting of Swiss scholarly sources over standard protocols — with the same output contract (metadata, not full text). It is institution-independent and subject-focused, which is why it does not overlap eth-library-mcp (ETH-institution Discovery & Persons) — the catalogue finds the book, the OA-legal path finds the freely readable article with its licence and DOI.

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Known Limitations

• Small, focused corpus. The three OA sources together hold on the order of a few hundred articles. Results are ranked by relevance — articles matching all query terms first, then partial matches — so a topical query like "Datenschutz im Bildungsbereich" returns the privacy-law corpus (ranked) rather than nothing; if no article covers the full topic intersection, the closest real matches are returned, never a fabricated one. A query that matches no term at all still returns an honest empty result.
• No full-text search. Matching runs over metadata (title, abstract, authorship) only — never the article body.
• Uneven DOI coverage. sui generis ≈ 100 %, Repositorium.ch partial, ex/ante has no DOIs (persistent URLs only). Aggregators (Crossref/OpenAlex) therefore cover sui generis well but miss ex/ante entirely and do not index Repositorium.ch as a source — which is why the server harvests each source natively rather than relying on an aggregator.
• Licence gaps. The native metadata rarely carries a machine-readable licence; "unknown" is common and only lifted where a DOI resolves in Crossref.
• Not a substitute for a paid legal database. This surfaces freely accessible Swiss legal scholarship only — it is not Swisslex/Weblaw and does not cover commercial or paywalled legal publishing.

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Prerequisites

• Python 3.11 or higher
• uv / uvx (recommended) or pip
• Internet access (all APIs are publicly available)

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Installation

Claude Desktop (recommended)

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

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

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "swiss-academic-libraries": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["swiss-academic-libraries-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop — the server starts automatically on first use.

Cloud / Self-hosted (Streamable HTTP)

uvx swiss-academic-libraries-mcp --http --port 8000 [--host 127.0.0.1]

Security & Deployment Notes

• Default binding is 127.0.0.1 (loopback only). The server has no built-in authentication.
• Use --host 0.0.0.0 only when running behind a reverse proxy that provides authentication and per-IP rate limits (e.g. nginx with limit_req + OAuth2-Proxy). Non-loopback bindings emit a WARN log.
• Logs go to stderr; set verbosity with MCP_LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG|INFO|WARNING.

Development

git clone https://github.com/malkreide/swiss-academic-libraries-mcp
cd swiss-academic-libraries-mcp
pip install -e .

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Quickstart

Start by calling library_info for a full overview. Then:

"Which books about Swiss primary schools are held in Swiss libraries?"
→ swisscovery_search(query='subject = "Volksschule"', max_records=20)

"Show digitised historical works from ETH Library"
→ erara_list_records(set_spec="zut")

"Which Swiss periodicals were digitised in 2023?"
→ eperiodica_list_records(from_date="2023-01-01", until_date="2023-12-31")

"What manuscript collections does e-manuscripta hold?"
→ emanuscripta_list_collections()

→ [More use cases by audience](EXAMPLES.md) →

💡 "No API key — just install and query."

CQL Search Syntax (swisscovery)

Full text:     Volksschule Zürich
Title:         title = "education reform"
Author:        creator = "Pestalozzi"
Subject:       subject = "pedagogy"
ISBN:          isbn = "978-3-05-006234-0"
Combined:      title = "school" AND creator = "Pestalozzi"
Pagination:    start_record = 11

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Configuration

No API keys required. All environment variables are optional.

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Project Structure

swiss-academic-libraries-mcp/
├── src/
│   └── swiss_academic_libraries_mcp/
│       ├── __init__.py       # Package init
│       ├── server.py         # FastMCP server, 13 tools, 2 prompts, 2 resources
│       ├── api_client.py     # HTTP client (+ retry), MARC21 + OAI-PMH/DC parsers
│       └── oa_legal.py       # OA legal-literature registry, adapters, model
├── tests/
│   ├── test_server.py        # catalogue unit tests + live smoke tests
│   ├── test_20_scenarios.py  # end-to-end catalogue scenarios
│   └── test_oa_legal.py      # OA legal-literature tests (mocked + live)
├── pyproject.toml
├── CHANGELOG.md
├── CONTRIBUTING.md            # Contributing guide (English)
├── CONTRIBUTING.de.md         # Contributing guide (German)
├── SECURITY.md               # Security policy (English)
├── SECURITY.de.md            # Security policy (German)
├── LICENSE
├── README.md                 # This file (English)
└── README.de.md              # German version

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Testing

# Unit tests (no network required)
PYTHONPATH=src pytest tests/ -m "not live"

# Live smoke tests (internet required)
PYTHONPATH=src pytest tests/ -m "live"

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Safety & Limits

• Read-only: All tools perform HTTP GET requests against public SRU and OAI-PMH endpoints — no data is written, modified, or deleted.
• No personal data: The APIs return bibliographic metadata (titles, authors, publication info, subject headings) and public digitisation records. No personally identifiable information (PII) about library users is processed or stored.
• Rate limits: swisscovery SRU and the OAI-PMH endpoints are public and have no documented hard limits, but OAI-PMH harvesting is paginated via resumption tokens — use from_date / until_date and keep max_records reasonable. The server enforces a 30s timeout per request.
• Data freshness: Results reflect the upstream catalogues at query time. No caching is performed by this server; indexing latency is controlled by SLSP and the digitisation platforms.
• Terms of service: Data is subject to the ToS and licences of each source — swisscovery / SLSP, e-rara, e-periodica, e-manuscripta. Most digitised material is in the public domain or under Creative Commons licences; always check the rights statement on the individual record before redistribution.
• No guarantees: This is a community project, not affiliated with SLSP, ETH Library, or any of the participating institutions. Availability depends on the upstream APIs.

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Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines on:

• Reporting bugs and requesting features
• Setting up the development environment
• Code style and test requirements
• Submitting pull requests

This project follows the conventions of the Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio.

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Security

To report a vulnerability, please follow the responsible disclosure process in SECURITY.md. The server is read-only and requires no API key; see the Safety & Limits section above for the security model.

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Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md

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Deployment for Swiss Public Administration

If you self-host this server for a Swiss school authority, archive, or municipal use case:

• Data residency: prefer on-premise or a CH-based cloud provider. The query patterns themselves (which library searches a civil servant runs) may reveal ongoing research and are best kept on Swiss infrastructure.
• Upstream calls go exclusively to CH-hosted services: SLSP / swisscovery, ETH-Bibliothek (e-rara, e-periodica, e-manuscripta). No data leaves Switzerland.
• Logging: logs are written to stderr; configure your IT retention policy accordingly (e.g. systemd-journal MaxRetentionSec).
• HTTP transport must run behind a reverse proxy with authentication and per-IP rate limits (see Security & Deployment Notes above).

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License

MIT License — see LICENSE

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Author

Hayal Oezkan · github.com/malkreide

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Credits & Related Projects

• Data (catalogue): swisscovery / SLSP · e-rara · e-periodica · e-manuscripta
• Data (OA legal literature): sui generis · ex/ante · Repositorium.ch — licence enrichment via Crossref. Each source's metadata is used under its own terms; open-access status does not imply an open reuse licence.
• Protocol: Model Context Protocol — Anthropic / Linux Foundation
• Related: eth-library-mcp — ETH Library Discovery & Persons API
• Portfolio: Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio

Installation

Run via uv's uvx — no clone or manual install needed. Add to your MCP client config (mcpServers for Claude Desktop, Cursor and Windsurf; use a top-level servers key for VS Code in .vscode/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "swiss-academic-libraries-mcp": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "swiss-academic-libraries-mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}