What is gallica-mcp CLAUDE.md?

Project instructions for Claude Code, an AI coding assistant, in a server that searches Gallica, the French National Library’s digital collection.

Working on full-text searches, exact or fuzzy matching, public-domain filters, result snippets, OCR text downloads, pagination, and page caching.

They describe the project structure and API details needed to change the search and document-retrieval code safely.

How nestordemeure/gallica-mcp configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to nestordemeure/gallica-mcp. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nestordemeure/gallica-mcp/main/CLAUDE.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nestordemeure/gallica-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/nestordemeure/gallica-mcp/claude-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/nestordemeure/gallica-mcp/claude-md)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/nestordemeure/gallica-mcp/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/nestordemeure/gallica-mcp/claude-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/nestordemeure/gallica-mcp/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/nestordemeure/gallica-mcp/claude-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 6,453 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 6,453 The same file — it is already loaded in full.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.06453	$0.06453
Opus 5	$0.03227	$0.03227
Sonnet 5	$0.01291	$0.01291
Haiku 4.5	$0.00645	$0.00645

Measured 11d ago against content hash 31cb58acd048, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

gallica-mcp CLAUDE.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

CLAUDE.md · 379 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 379 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Gallica MCP Server

An MCP server for a search of Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and for retrieval of its documents.

Stack

Python ≥3.12, uv, fastMCP ≥2.0.0, httpx ≥0.27.0

Functions

A full-text search with the CQL operators (AND, OR, NOT, exact phrases)
Control of exact matching against fuzzy matching (exact matching is the default)
A filter on the access rights, for public-domain documents with an OCR download
Text snippets that show the search terms in context (through the optional get_snippets tool, which uses the ContentSearch API)
An OCR text download by page range, with a local cache for each page
Pagination up to 50 results for each page

Structure

gallica-mcp/
├── .claude/skills/gallica-search/   # Skill documenting the CLI
├── src/gallica_mcp/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── alto.py             # ALTO XML -> plain text
│   ├── client.py           # API client + caching
│   ├── cli.py              # `gallica` command-line interface
│   ├── paths.py            # Cache location resolution
│   ├── query_parser.py     # CQL query construction
│   ├── server.py           # FastMCP tools
│   └── install.py          # MCP server installer
├── pyproject.toml
└── CLAUDE.md               # This file

client.py holds all the behaviour. server.py and cli.py are thin presentation layers over it, so the search semantics and the cache stay identical for each method of access. The CLI shows each filter without a condition. The MCP server hides them behind --enable-advanced-search.

API Details

Search API:

Protocol: SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) version 1.2
Base URL: https://gallica.bnf.fr/SRU
Query language: CQL (Contextual Query Language)
Response format: XML with Dublin Core metadata
Collapsing: the client uses the collapsing=false parameter, so the server returns each periodical issue separately and does not group them by collection

ContentSearch API:

Base URL: https://gallica.bnf.fr/services/ContentSearch
Returns text snippets with the search terms highlighted
The get_snippets tool uses it. The requests pass through the rate limiter: one request each 3s by default, with one request at a time.

Read the full file on GitHub · 379 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

11d ago First seen · 379 lines · 6,453 tokens per session scan A 31cb58acd048

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gallica-mcp CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository nestordemeure/gallica-mcp (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 6,453 tokens to every session, about $0.0323 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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gallica-mcp: Instructions file for Claude Code