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Arke Institute MCP Server

MCP server for semantic search across Arke Institute's NARA archives and presidential libraries

Installation

Add the following to your MCP client configuration file.

Configuration

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arke-institute-arke-mcp-server": {
      "url": "https://arke-mcp-server.<your-account>.workers.dev/sse"
    }
  }
}

You run an MCP server that enables AI assistants to perform fast, semantic searches across Arke Institute’s archival holdings. It connects your client (like Claude Desktop or an MCP playground) to a powerful search API that returns relevant documents, extracted text, and rich metadata from NARA records and presidential libraries. The server supports multiple entity types, quick responses, and easy integration with your preferred MCP client.

How to use

You connect an MCP client to the server to run natural language searches over the archive. Use the dedicated search tool to query across institutions, collections, series, file units, and digital objects. You can filter results by namespace to focus on digitized documents, file units, or other entity types. The tool returns similarity scores, titles, identifiers, dates, locations, access restrictions, and any extracted text available from digitized materials.

How to install

Prerequisites: you need Node.js and npm installed on your machine.

# 1) Install Node.js and npm if you don’t have them
# 2) Clone the project repository
git clone https://github.com/arke-institute/arke-mcp.git
cd arke-mcp/arke-mcp-server

# 3) Install dependencies
npm install

# 4) Run for local development (MCP server starts on http://localhost:8787)
npm run dev

Additional setup and deployment options

For deployment to Cloudflare Workers, you can create a Cloudflare-enabled MCP server using the template and deploy it. This runs the server as a worker and exposes the MCP endpoint under a workers.dev URL.

npm create cloudflare@latest -- arke-mcp-server --template=arke-institute/arke-mcp
cd arke-mcp-server
npm run deploy
```

The server’s SSE endpoint will be available at arke-mcp-server.<your-account>.workers.dev/sse

Connect to clients and start using the search tool

Choose your MCP client, then configure it to point to either the local or deployed server. For local development, use the local SSE URL http://localhost:8787/sse. For deployment, use the Cloudflare Workers SSE URL provided after deployment.

Endpoints and tooling

API endpoints include a Server-Sent Events (SSE) endpoint for the MCP protocol and a standard HTTP MCP endpoint. Use the SSE endpoint for real-time event streaming and the HTTP endpoint for standard requests. The server also exposes a query tool named search_arke to perform semantic searches across the Arke Institute archive.

Available tools

search_arke

Performs semantic search across Arke Institute archives, returning relevant entity results, extracted text, and rich metadata.