alexandria

alexandria is a skill for Claude Code from The-40-Thieves/alexandria-mcp. It costs 71 tokens per session (611 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research skill that uses Alexandria to search and read material from 152 public digital libraries, then produce answers or reports with citations. Alexandria is a service for finding sources such as papers, books, legal records, news, and documentation.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps answer research questions, retrieve full texts, follow citation links, and create single-question answers or multi-round research reports.
Why use it?
It avoids manually searching multiple libraries and helps connect answers to identifiable sources.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the alexandria plugin — 1 skill, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit It helps answer research questions, retrieve full texts, follow citation links, and create single-question answers or multi-round research reports.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp/alexandria
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 The-40-Thieves/alexandria-mcp --skill alexandria
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/The-40-Thieves/alexandria-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install alexandria, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 1 MCP server.

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 alexandria

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp/alexandria/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp/alexandria)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp/alexandria"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp/alexandria/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 alexandria

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp/alexandria"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp/alexandria.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 71 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 611 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 $0.00071 $0.00611
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00305
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00122
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00061

Measured 5d ago against content hash 2ad4f7f94a1d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alexandria 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 5d 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.

skills/alexandria/SKILL.md · 60 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 60 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Alexandria

Query, read, and ingest texts from 152 public digital libraries through the @the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp MCP server.

Install

npx -y @the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp

Or add it to a client directly, for example Claude Code:

claude mcp add alexandria -- npx -y @the-40-thieves/alexandria-mcp

Search and read need no credentials. library_ask, library_answer, library_research, and library_ingest need OPENAI_API_KEY; see the README for the full list of optional keys.

Workflow

Start with library_ask(query) - it routes a natural-language question to the best sources and searches them in parallel. Use library_search(query, source, limit?) instead when you already know which of the 152 sources to query.

Once a result names a source/id pair, library_read(id, source) fetches the full text.

For a synthesized, cited answer instead of raw results, use library_answer(query) for a single question or library_research(query, depth?, breadth?, max_minutes?) for a recursive multi-round report that generates its own follow-up queries.

library_citations(id, source, direction, limit?, format?) walks the citation graph around an item forward (direction: "citations") or backward (direction: "references") for snowball searching, and can export the result as a bibtex, ris, or apa bibliography.

If a source looks like it is misbehaving (no results, stale data, repeated errors), call library_health_check(source?, cluster?) before trusting or retrying it.

response_format

library_ask, library_search, library_answer, library_research, and library_health_check take response_format: "concise" | "detailed" (default concise). concise returns the high-signal fields only (title, source, id, year, hasFullText, url; the answer/report plus citations; health name, cluster, status). detailed adds routing reasons, relevance scores, per-stage diagnostics, and per-source error rate, latency, and quota usage - ask for it when you need to explain or debug a result, not by default.

Read the full file on GitHub · 60 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. 5d ago First seen · 60 lines · 71 tokens per session scan A 2ad4f7f94a1d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alexandria is a skill published in the GitHub repository The-40-Thieves/alexandria-mcp (1 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 71 tokens to every session and 611 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 2026-09-07.

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