loc-search

loc-search is a skill for Claude Code from nestordemeure/loc-mcp. It costs 74 tokens per session (8,132 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A command-line search tool for digitised Library of Congress newspapers, books, and manuscripts, including page-level full text from 1736 onward.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps research performers’ American careers, immigrant-language press coverage, local notices, and historical books or personal papers.
Why use it?
It brings several American historical collections and many languages into one searchable interface, so you do not have to search each archive separately.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Good fit It helps research performers’ American careers, immigrant-language press coverage, local notices, and historical books or personal papers.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nestordemeure/loc-mcp/loc-search
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add nestordemeure/loc-mcp --skill loc-search
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nestordemeure/loc-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.

agentmods badge for loc-search

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nestordemeure/loc-mcp/loc-search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nestordemeure/loc-mcp/loc-search)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nestordemeure/loc-mcp/loc-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nestordemeure/loc-mcp/loc-search/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for loc-search

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nestordemeure/loc-mcp/loc-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nestordemeure/loc-mcp/loc-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 8,132 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 $0.00074 $0.08132
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.04066
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.01626
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00813

Measured 12d ago against content hash fa44ac603d08, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

loc-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/loc-search/SKILL.md · 324 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 324 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Library of Congress

One API with no key over each item that the Library of Congress digitised and transcribed: newspapers from 1736 to 1963, digitised books, and manuscript collections. Each item has a full-text index, and each item resolves to the individual page.

Use it for the American part of a career — the tour circuit, local notices, and articles that explain methods. It is the counterpart to Gallica and ANNO. Two properties make it different:

  • It is not only newspapers. The books and the manuscripts are in the same index, and they search in the same way. Thus the conjuring literature and the personal papers come back together with the press. A search of everything is the default, and --collection is how you make the search narrow.
  • It is not only English. The newspaper corpus holds many languages. The American immigrant press published in more languages than most national archives hold.

Coverage by language

The pages in the newspaper collection, from its own language facet:

english 22,499,675 german 619,712 spanish 453,914 polish 169,005
french 135,671 yiddish 132,713 italian 88,547 czech 58,960
norwegian 49,635 serbian 46,789

Each language searches in the same way. The community that came to a performance in the United States wrote about the performer, so the Spanish, Polish and Yiddish press are not a small detail. Frequently they hold a notice that the English papers did not print.

The shape of each decade is very different for each language, and it decides if a subset is worth a search. Each column sums to the total for that language exactly, so these are counts and not estimates:

Decade german spanish polish yiddish italian
1880s 22,933 1,642 1
1890s 103,779 44,278 22,010 296 3,974
1900s 128,127 63,073 39,083 0 24,033
1910s 177,394 66,021 70,108 24,719 34,400
1920s 24,075 70,765 31,847 24,178 6,705

Read the full file on GitHub · 324 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 · 324 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A fa44ac603d08

Subscribe to this mod's changes

loc-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository nestordemeure/loc-mcp (0 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 8,132 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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