gallica-mcp: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/gallica-search/SKILL.md

gallica-search is a skill for Claude Code from nestordemeure/gallica-mcp. It costs 52 tokens per session (3,900 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A command-line search tool for Gallica, the digital library of France’s national library. It searches French newspapers, periodicals, books, manuscripts, and some English-language material, then retrieves OCR text—the text recognized from scanned pages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find sources by keywords, dates, authors, subjects, or language; locate mentions within documents; and download text from selected pages.
Why use it?
It makes historical French and European press research easier than searching scanned library collections by hand.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: mentions subagents.

This is nestordemeure/gallica-mcp's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on gallica-mcp itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything gallica-mcp configures →

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/skills/gallica-search/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nestordemeure/gallica-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

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README.md
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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.

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Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,900 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00052 $0.03900
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01950
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00780
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00390

Measured 12d ago against content hash 051cf78feb39, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

gallica-search 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 12d 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/skills/gallica-search/SKILL.md · 132 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 132 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Gallica

The digital library of the BnF: French newspapers, periodicals, books and manuscripts. It also holds some English-language titles, such as the Paris edition of the New York Herald. Use it for European press reports about performers who travelled in Continental Europe.

Commands

gallica search "<query>" [--pages N|N-M|all] [--sort ORDER] [filters] [--json]
gallica snippets <ark> "<query>"   # where the query appears inside one document
gallica get <ark> [--pages 30-35]  # download OCR text, prints path to the cached file

Note that --pages has a different meaning on each command. On search it means the result pages. On get it means the document pages.

The filters for search are --creator NAME (repeatable), --type TYPE (repeatable, from monographie, périodique, fascicule, manuscrit, image, carte, partition), --from-year, --to-year, --language CODE (ISO 639-2: fre, eng, ger…), --title TEXT, --subject HEADING, --publisher NAME, --library NAME, --min-ocr-quality SCORE, --include-restricted and --fuzzy.

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

A search gives no snippets. This is the important difference in the procedure. search gives you documents. Then snippets tells you if a document has value. Only then does get download it. If you go directly from search to get, you spend a large download on documents that hold one brief mention.

snippets marks the matched terms with {braces} and gives a page identifier such as PAG_30 for each occurrence. Its snippets hold one or two sentences of real context, not a few words. Thus they are frequently enough to judge a document and to quote it in a report with no download.

These page identifiers go directly into get. Gallica sends the OCR one page for each request, so get takes a page range, and --pages accepts the PAG_30 form exactly:

gallica snippets ark:/12148/bd6t5841739g "prestidigitateur"   # → occurrences on PAG_3, PAG_4
gallica get ark:/12148/bd6t5841739g --pages PAG_3-PAG_4       # → two requests, not sixteen

Read the full file on GitHub · 132 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.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 132 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 051cf78feb39

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gallica-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository nestordemeure/gallica-mcp (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 3,900 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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