🇨🇭 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

---

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.

It also adds the international metadata layer: DOI resolution and international research literature via Crossref, and preprints via arXiv. 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)	SRU / MARC21	500+ Swiss libraries	10M+
e-rara	OAI-PMH / Dublin Core	Digitised historical prints	250k+
e-periodica	OAI-PMH / Dublin Core	Digitised periodicals (1750–today)	1M+ articles
e-manuscripta	OAI-PMH / Dublin Core	Manuscripts & archival material	100k+

Open-Access legal literature (metadata only)

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

International metadata layer (metadata only)

Source	Protocol	Content	Licence
Crossref	REST / JSON	DOI resolution + international research literature	Metadata CC0 1.0 (public domain)
arXiv	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):