mcp-archiveorg

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library that keeps what the world publishes: scanned books, films, recorded music, radio, software, and the pages of the web itself, captured over and over since 1996 in the Wayback Machine. Millions of its books and documents have been run through optical character recognition, so the words inside them can be searched, and the Open Library index beside it describes works, their editions and their subjects.

This server connects a chat client to that library. You can search the full text inside its documents, search its catalogue of items, read one item's record and its files, look up a book by subject, place, period or person, and read the web as it stood on a given day. It needs no API key and no account.

Version française

Install

One-click install

Claude Code

claude mcp add archiveorg -- npx -y mcp-archiveorg

Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any client using the standard config format

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "archiveorg": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-archiveorg"]
    }
  }
}

Node 24 or later is required, and no environment variable has to be set.

With Docker

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "archiveorg": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "ghcr.io/smeet666/mcp-archiveorg:2.0.2"]
    }
  }
}

-i keeps stdin open, which is where the protocol travels, and -t is left out because a TTY rewrites the stream. The container needs outbound HTTPS to archive.org, web.archive.org and openlibrary.org, and nothing else: no volume, no port, no credential.

Bundle, without npm

Download mcp-archiveorg-2.0.2.mcpb from the latest release and open it. A client that supports MCP bundles installs it on its own, with no npm and no configuration file to edit. The bundle carries its dependencies, so nothing is fetched at install time.

What you can ask

• "Which books mention the Beaumont light-house?"
• "Find me items about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake."
• "What files does that item hold, and what licence is it under?"
• "Find me books on beekeeping in France published before 1900."
• "What did that website look like in March 2001?"

The ordinary path runs from a search to a record: a row carries an identifier, and get_item reads it.

Tools

search_inside

Searches the text inside the archive's documents, which came off the page through optical character recognition, so a passage carries the misreadings of that process.

In return: hits, each carrying identifier, which get_item takes; title, creator and year; excerpts, the passages as a machine read them off the page; matched_file, naming what actually holds the passage; and source_url. inside_container is true when the item bundles several documents and the passage sits in one of them, in which case the title, the creator and the year belong to the container.

total counts documents, and it pages. It is a number of documents and the last page of a match set is shorter than the first. No page number is available: the index reports where the text sits inside the item, which is 1 on nearly every match, so nothing here states a page of a book and no link claims one.

search_items

Searches the catalogue itself, across every kind of thing the archive holds.

In return: items, each carrying identifier, title, creator, year, media_type, downloads and source_url, a field the record leaves empty being null. total counts the items matching across the catalogue, which is more than the number returned.

get_item

Reads one item's record. The heavier parts are asked for rather than served by default, since a record can run long.