Smithsonian Open Access MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for the Smithsonian Institution’s Open Access collections. It lets AI assistants such as Claude Desktop search more than 14 million object records and 2.8 million archive records from Smithsonian museums, libraries, archives and research centers, find out what is on display now, and fetch full object records with images and links to the museum websites.

Ask, for example:

Which Muppets are on display right now at the National Museum of American History?

The assistant calls search_objects(query="muppet", museum="American History", on_view=true) and finds the objects currently on view, such as:

Version 2.0 replaces the 28 tools of version 1.x with 5. See Migrating from 1.x and the changelog.

Contents

• Quick Start
• HTTP transport
• Tools
• Resources
• Prompts
• Search tips
• Migrating from 1.x
• Integration
• Requirements
• Testing
• Service Management
• Troubleshooting

Quick Start

You need:

• A free API key from api.data.gov/signup
• uv. uv downloads a compatible Python (3.10 or newer) if one is not already installed.

The server speaks MCP over stdio by default. MCP clients such as Claude Desktop start it on demand; you do not run it in the background yourself. For clients that connect over HTTP, it can also run as a long-lived server; see HTTP transport.

Claude Desktop with uvx (recommended)

Add this to claude_desktop_config.json. It installs and runs the server straight from the GitHub repository, with no clone or virtual environment to manage:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "smithsonian_open_access": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "--from",
        "git+https://github.com/molanojustin/smithsonian-mcp",
        "smithsonian-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "SMITHSONIAN_API_KEY": "your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}