Open Archives

What it is

An MCP server generated from the Open Archives OpenAPI specification. It exposes the Dutch genealogy dataset — births, deaths, marriages, censuses — along with per-archive statistics, KNMI historical weather, and full-text transcriptions of scanned documents, and returns links back to the record pages on openarchieven.nl.

What you get

• search_records, show_record and match_record — search the record set, open one record, and match a person to their birth and death records
• get_births, get_deaths, get_marriages and get_births_years_ago — event-specific lookups, including births from N years ago
• get_archives, get_record_stats, get_source_type_stats, get_event_type_stats and get_comment_stats — which archives exist and how many records each holds, by source and event type
• get_family_name_stats, get_first_name_stats and get_profession_stats — name and profession frequency across the corpus
• get_breakdown — a cross-tabulation grouped by archive, source type, event type, place or year
• get_historical_weather and get_census_data — KNMI weather for a date, and Dutch census data from 1795 to 1899
• search_transcriptions, browse_transcriptions and show_transcription — full-text search over page transcriptions, hierarchical browsing by archive or inventory, and a single page by id
• view_transcription — opens transcribed pages in a deep-zoom IIIF viewer with the transcript beside them, on hosts that render MCP Apps; elsewhere it falls back to a text summary with source URLs

Requirements

Nothing — Open Archives is a public dataset and the hosted endpoint at https://mcp.openarchieven.nl/ takes no authentication. Add it as a custom connector by URL. Self-hosting needs Node.js 18+, npm and optionally Redis for caching; the upstream API allows 4 requests per second per IP, and the server queues calls through a rate limiter to stay under it.

Setup effort

Add the hosted endpoint — paste it into your client

Tools you get

22 tools named in the project's documentation. view_transcription appears only over MCP, not the REST GET /tools endpoint, and on hosts without the MCP Apps extension it returns a text summary with IIIF URLs instead of a viewer.

Requires

• Node.js 18+
• Redis (optional)

Where it runs

Of the 3 documented clients, 1 runs the server on your machine and 2 connect to a hosted endpoint.