lantern-mcp: Skill for Claude Code

Lantern (Media History Digital Library)

The digitised entertainment trade press, with a full-text index and no key: Variety, Billboard, the New York Clipper, Motion Picture Herald, Boxoffice, The Film Daily, the studio year books and the fan magazines. The period is approximately 1900 to 1960, and the Clipper goes back into the 19th century.

Do not search this archive in the way that you search a newspaper archive. It is not one. Each other source in this toolkit gives you the general press: what the industry told the public. Lantern gives you the industry that writes about itself — who had a booking and where, for what money, who died, whose act a competitor stole, and which theatre had no show that week. A minor performer who took whatever bookings came usually has no other continuous record.

Use it for these subjects:

• routes and bookings
• salaries
• descriptions of acts by people who saw the act on the same night
• obituaries
• disputes about billing
• the terms that the trade used for what an act was

Lantern and Internet Archive hold almost the same material — read this before you use both

The scans that Lantern indexes are Internet Archive items, in the mediahistory collection, and the archives client searches their full text correctly. These are not two archives. They are two indexes of one archive. On "mind reader" they find the same material: archives --collection mediahistory reports 1,142 documents, and Lantern reports 1,783 pages across approximately 1,090 volumes.

Thus do not search both sources and add the totals. The same page found two times is one page. If a report gives a number from each source, that report counts the same material two times.

Lantern has value for two reasons only:

• It resolves a result to a page, and archives cannot. For this material, the usual solution of a download and a local grep does not give the position either. archives get variety04-1906-10 gives 881 KB of text that holds the phrase and no page boundaries of any type. Thus you can find the passage but you cannot cite it. Lantern gives the leaf number in the search response, with no additional cost.
• Its --collection categories separate the stage from film — Theatre and Vaudeville and Early Cinema. Internet Archive has no equivalent, and this is the difference between 1,783 results and the 546 results that concern a stage act.