smeet666/mcp-databnf

Overview

An MCP server that provides search access to data.bnf.fr, the open catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It enables querying for authors and their works through the Model Context Protocol. Built in TypeScript.

Best for

Best for
Developers building AI assistants that need French national library data

Use cases

• Search for authors by name
• Find works by a specific author
• Retrieve bibliographic records from BnF

How to use

Install

claude mcp add databnf -- npx -y mcp-databnf

Tools exposed

• search_authors
• get_author
• search_works
• get_work
• list_works
• list_editions
• find_digitised
• author_id
• include_depictions
• work_id
• BNF_USER_AGENT
• BNF_MIN_INTERVAL_MS
• BNF_TIMEOUT_MS
• BNF_MAX_RETRIES
• BNF_CACHE_TTL_MS
• BNF_CACHE_MAX_ENTRIES
• BNF_LOG_LEVEL
• not_found
• invalid_input
• rate_limited

Tested with

Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Continue, VS Code

Notes

An MCP server that provides search access to data.bnf.fr, the open catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It enables querying for authors and their works through the Model Context Protocol. Built in TypeScript.

0 stars on GitHub. Last updated 2026-09-07. Licensed MIT.

Use cases

• Search for authors by name
• Find works by a specific author
• Retrieve bibliographic records from BnF

Pros

• Direct access to BnF’s open data
• Simple MCP integration for AI assistants
• TypeScript implementation

Cons

• Depends on BnF API availability and rate limits
• Limited to the data available in data.bnf.fr
• May not cover all BnF collections

Indexed from awesome-mcp-servers-punkpeye and enriched against its public facts.