Source Library

RETURNS A LIST OF BOOKS (works on a topic) — NOT passages. PICK THIS to discover which works exist on a subject. → For quotable text use search_translations (exact words) or search_concept (by meaning); if the user already named an author/work, call get_book directly (or list_books to find the ID) — the AI summary + chapter outline is usually the right first answer. Searches titles, authors, subje

RETURNS QUOTABLE PASSAGES (page-level snippets + citation URLs), matched by KEYWORD/term. PICK THIS to find a quote or textual evidence on a topic across the whole library. → If the modern word won't literally appear in historical texts, use search_concept (matches by meaning); to list which BOOKS cover a topic use search_library; to dig inside one known book use search_within_book; if the user na

RETURNS QUOTABLE PASSAGES matched by MEANING (cosine similarity on Gemini embeddings, 768d) — paraphrases and adjacent phrasings match even with zero keyword overlap. PICK THIS when the modern term won't literally appear in historical texts — e.g. "distributed cognition" maps to passages about active intellect, art of memory, wax tablet metaphors; "social contract" maps to pre-Hobbesian discussion

SEARCHES INSIDE ONE BOOK (requires book_id). PRIMARILY KEYWORD: it runs a lexical search over the book's pages plus a narrow scoped-semantic pass (top ~10), interleaved by relevance. PICK THIS when you know the wording you are looking for, or want every page of one book mentioning a term. → IF YOU ARE SEARCHING FROM A PARAPHRASE, a half-remembered line, or a modern restatement, USE search_concept

BROWSES/FILTERS THE CATALOG by metadata (canonical author via author_id, title/author/summary words via search, language, category, year range, translation recency) — no page-text matching. PICK THIS to see WHAT EXISTS by an author or in a tradition, or to enumerate a date range. Returns books with title, author (string + canonical author_id + author_url), language, year, and translation progress.

READ PIPELINE step 1 — DISCOVER. START HERE for any named work or author. Returns the book's AI-generated summary, chapter list, edition metadata, DOI, page counts, IIIF manifest, and the cover image (inline, so you and the user can see the book). LANGUAGE: `language` is what is printed on THIS EDITION's leaves, which is frequently not the language the work was written in. Where the record knows t

READ PIPELINE step 2 — READ. Read a book's text. Call get_book first (step 1) for the chapter list, then come here. Preferred: use the chapter param to read one chapter at a time (includes [Page N] markers for citation). Alternatively, use from/to for explicit page ranges (e.g. from=1 to=50). When you find passages worth quoting, hand the page numbers to get_quote / get_quotes (step 3) for verbati

READ PIPELINE step 3 — CITE. Get the exact verbatim text of a single page plus its citation apparatus. ALWAYS use before putting text in quotation marks. The response headline is citation_link (the stable sourcelibrary.org/q/… shortlink) — present it to the user alongside the quote. Render as: > [exact translation text, verbatim] > — [Author], [citation.locator]. [citation_link] PAGE BREAKS: this

Every edition of one work that the library holds — the other witnesses to the same text, across languages and centuries. Give it a book_id (easiest: the id of any edition you already found) or a work_id. USE THIS when a quotation needs checking against more than one witness, when you want the original-language text behind a translation, or when comparing how a passage reads across editions — diffe

DOES THE LIBRARY HOLD THIS WORK? Call this BEFORE telling the user the library lacks a book, and before proposing one for acquisition. A miss from list_books or search_library is NOT evidence of absence: list_books matches words and search_library ranks by relevance, so a held book can sit behind dozens of better-ranked hits. Give a title + author (+ year if known), or a library URL (Internet Arch

READ PIPELINE step 3 — CITE, in batch. Get verbatim text + citation_link for SEVERAL pages of a single book in one round-trip, to assemble a multi-passage dossier. Specify either pages (an explicit array, e.g. [12, 40, 41]) or an inclusive from/to range. Max 25 pages per call. Each entry carries its own citation_link to present alongside the quote, and — on non-Latin-script pages that have one — a

Search 200,000+ historical illustrations, emblems, engravings, diagrams, AND 24,000+ artworks (paintings, prints, sculptures). Filter by type, subject, figure, symbol, year. Results interleave two collections: illustrations extracted from book pages (each with a page number and book link) and standalone museum artworks (type: "artwork"). The first few results also return as inline images YOU can s

List the legal values of search_images' type, subject, figure and symbol filters, with how many images carry each. Those filters are EXACT string matches on tags an AI extractor wrote, and each vocabulary runs to thousands of strings (e.g. "musical notes", "Jesus Christ", "medicinal plants"), so a guessed value usually matches nothing. Look it up here first. Call with no facet for the top values o

Submit feedback, bug reports, or feature requests to the Source Library team. Before proposing NEW functionality, read https://sourcelibrary.org/llms.txt and https://sourcelibrary.org/developers — several past submissions proposed building things that already exist (IIIF manifests, Content Search, DTS), which wastes reviewer time. State in the report which docs you checked. Bug reports with record

Share a research dossier back to the Source Library team — a title, an optional summary, and an ordered list of citations (the passages your thesis rests on). Each citation is a reference { book_id, page, note }, NOT copied text: the library re-renders the canonical quote from the reference, so links stay authoritative. Use this when the user has assembled a thesis backed by passages across one or

Propose a themed collection of books to the Source Library team — a title, a rationale (why these books belong together and what thread connects them), and an ordered list of book ids. Get book ids from search_library / list_books / get_book. Like submit_feedback and share_findings, this goes to the team for REVIEW — it does NOT create a public collection instantly; a curator reviews and approves

Start a volunteer REVIEW SHIFT: the user lends their Claude (you) to Source Library to check one book, page by page, against its scans. Use when the user wants to help Source Library, says "start a shift" or "review pages", or asks how they can contribute. The user does NOT need to read the book's language: YOU do the checking (scan against transcription, transcription against English) and the use

Next page of the book being reviewed. Call it straight after finishing a page until the stretch the user chose is done, and again when they ask for more. Pass next.book and next.after from the previous page, and volunteer_code. Returns the same shape as start_review_shift; follow how_to_run again. When page is null the book is finished: say so and offer start_review_shift with new_book true.

OPTIONAL lane, only for a user who reads the original language and asks to judge pages themselves: up to five random pages from different books, each with scan, transcription and English. Here the USER is the reviewer: ask for THEIR verdict first, before any opinion of yours, then give your reading with exact quotes, let them accept or reject each point, and call submit_page_review with mode "blin

Record the verdict on one page of a shift. mode "book-run" (start_review_shift / continue_review_shift): the verdict and findings are YOURS, from reading the scan and both texts; set user_looked true if the user checked anything on the page themselves. mode "blind" (start_blind_check): the verdict is the USER'S, given before your reading; put yours in assistant_verdict. Verdicts: both_sound (trans

During a review shift, propose a correction to a page's transcription (field "ocr") or English (field "translation"). A correction is a list of exact span edits: each "find" must be copied exactly from the text the shift returned and occur once on the page (add surrounding words if it repeats); "replace" is the corrected text ("" deletes). Fix only what the scan or the original shows is wrong: mis

Turn a CANONICAL CITATION into the actual leaves that carry it. Aristotle is cited by Bekker number (1094a8, 1447a) and Plato by Stephanus number (Rep. 328b) — the references scholarship has used for centuries, which survive re-typesetting and are shareable in a way a scan page never is. USE THIS FIRST whenever a passage arrives as a canonical reference rather than a page: do not try to derive the