Summary
Extracting your own annotations is the feature — the library metadata was never the hard part.
Titles and abstracts are searchable anywhere. What is trapped is the highlight you made on page fourteen three years ago, which is precisely the thing you are trying to find again. Pulling annotations out means a question can be answered from your own reading rather than from the paper's abstract. The local option matters for the same reason: the library is on your machine, and it does not need to leave it.
What it is
A connection to Zotero, the reference manager, reaching either the local application or the web API, and going into the documents rather than stopping at the metadata.
What you get
- Access through the local Zotero or the web API
- PDF annotation extraction — the highlights and notes you left in the papers
- Advanced search across the library
Requirements
Python, installed from PyPI. MIT licensed.
Setup effort
One command plus a key — uv tool install zotero-mcp-server, then supply credentials