anno-mcp: Skill for Claude Code

ANNO

The newspaper archive of the Austrian National Library holds approximately 28 million pages across more than 1,600 titles, from 1735 to the present day. It is almost all German-language, and Vienna is its centre. ANNO can do a full-text search on more than 91% of the holdings (the ÖNB gives this figure itself).

Use it for the German-language press: the Viennese daily papers and the Austro-Hungarian provincial papers, and also the satirical and trade weekly papers. It is the natural counterpart to Gallica. Gallica gives you the French reception of a performer who travelled, and ANNO gives you the Central European reception. For mentalism it is exceptionally strong on the 1880s to the 1930s. Vienna was where the Gedankenleser travelled and performed, and where Erik Jan Hanussen lived, worked and died.

Commands

anno search "<query>" [--pages N|N-M|all] [--sort ORDER] [filters] [--json]
anno snippets <documentId> "<query>"   # which page of an issue, in context
anno get <documentId> [--page N]       # OCR text, prints path to the cached file

The filters for search are --from-year, --to-year, --title ACRONYM, --place PLACE, --language CODE, --subject TEXT and --format {newspaper,periodical}.

--sort takes relevance (default), date_asc or date_desc.

These six filters are all of the facets of ANNO. The search sidebar has exactly six groups, and the client uses each one. There is no --provider flag, no --collection flag and no --genre flag, by decision. ANNO is an archive with one provider (the ÖNB owns all of it) and a flat structure, so those facets do not exist. The client does not omit them. ANNO does not have them.

The publication frequency is also not a facet. It is inside --subject, as Tageszeitung and Wochenzeitung.

A search resolves to an issue, not to a page. A result says this issue of Der Morgen holds 59 matches. snippets changes that into page 7, and here is the sentence. That middle step holds most of the value on this source, and it is usually sufficient to quote in a report with no download: