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How it Works

ra-mcp uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give AI assistants direct access to the Swedish National Archives. Instead of the AI guessing about historical documents, it can search and read them in real time.

What is MCP?

MCP is an open protocol that lets AI models call external tools. Think of it like a USB port for AI — any model that speaks MCP can plug into any MCP server and use its tools.

graph LR
  A["AI Client\n(Claude, ChatGPT, etc)"] <-->|"MCP\ntool calls"| B["ra-mcp Server"]
  B --> C["Riksarkivet\nData Platform\n(Search, IIIF, ALTO, OAI-PMH)"]
  B --> D["HTRflow\nGradio Space\n(Handwritten text recognition)"]

When you ask Claude "Find documents about trolldom", the AI:

  1. Recognizes it needs to search historical archives
  2. Calls the search_transcribed tool via MCP
  3. ra-mcp queries the Riksarkivet Search API
  4. Results come back through MCP to the AI
  5. The AI presents them to you with context and analysis

The Tools

search_transcribed

Searches AI-transcribed text across millions of digitised historical document pages. Supports advanced Solr query syntax including wildcards, fuzzy matching, boolean operators, proximity searches, and date filtering.

Example query flow:

User: "Find 17th century court records mentioning trolldom near Stockholm"

AI calls: search_transcribed(
    keyword='("Stockholm trolldom"~10)',
    offset=0,
    year_min=1600,
    year_max=1699,
    sort="timeAsc"
)

search_metadata

Searches document metadata fields — titles, personal names, place names, archival descriptions, and provenance. Covers 2M+ records. Useful for finding specific archives, people, or locations.

browse_document

Retrieves complete page transcriptions from a specific document. Each result includes the full transcribed text and direct links to the original page images in Riksarkivet's image viewer.

htr_transcribe

Transcribes handwritten document images using AI-powered handwritten text recognition (HTRflow). Accepts image URLs and returns an interactive viewer, per-page transcription data, and archival exports in ALTO XML, PAGE XML, or JSON. Supports Swedish, Norwegian, English, and medieval documents.

view_document

Displays document pages in an interactive viewer with zoomable images and text layer overlays. The viewer runs directly inside the MCP host (Claude, ChatGPT) as an MCP App.

See Tools & Skills for full parameter documentation.