Iwac Mcp Server

IWAC MCP Server

A read-only Model Context Protocol server for the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC). Ships as a one-click Desktop Extension (.mcpb) for Claude Desktop, backed by the IWAC Hugging Face dataset.

Install

Each release ships a server bundle for your operating system plus a research-skill .zip. The .mcpb gives Claude the data and tools; the .zip adds a research skill that teaches Claude how to use them. Install the server first, then install the skill too — strongly recommended for getting the most out of the tools: it makes Claude search and synthesize far more efficiently, with fewer wasted queries.

1. The MCP server — pick the bundle for your OS

| Your OS | Download | | ---------------------------------- | ------------------------------ | | Windows (Intel/AMD or Snapdragon) | iwac-mcp-server-windows.mcpb | | macOS (Apple Silicon or Intel) | iwac-mcp-server-macos.mcpb |

1. Download the bundle for your OS from

Releases.

1. Double-click the file. Claude Desktop shows an install dialog — click Install.
2. On first use the server downloads ~250 MB of parquet data from Hugging Face

into ~/.iwac-mcp/cache/ (override in the extension settings).

No Python, no uv, no venv — the bundle ships a self-contained Node runtime and the DuckDB binaries for your OS (x64 and arm64; Claude Desktop picks the right one). Claude Desktop has no Linux build, so no Linux bundle is published.

2. The research skill — iwac-mcp-skill.zip (strongly recommended)

The [iwac-mcp skill](.agents/skills/iwac-mcp/SKILL.md) wraps the raw tools in a structured research workflow: a five-phase methodology, francophone search strategy, source attribution with confidence grading, and bias/coverage caveats. It makes the server far more efficient to use — Claude picks the right tool and search terms on the first pass (fewer wasted queries), searches French sources properly, and returns a cited synthesis instead of a raw tool dump. You can run the tools without it, but you'll get more out of every query with it installed.

Download iwac-mcp-skill.zip from the same release, then:

• Claude Desktop — open **Customize → Skills → + → Create skill → Upload a

skill** and select the zip. (Or unzip it into ~/.claude/skills/ and restart Claude Desktop.)

• Claude Code — unzip it into your skills directory; Claude Code discovers it

live, no restart needed:

``bash # macOS / Linux unzip iwac-mcp-skill.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/ ``

``powershell # Windows (PowerShell) Expand-Archive iwac-mcp-skill.zip -DestinationPath $HOME\.claude\skills\ ``

Both land the skill at ~/.claude/skills/iwac-mcp/. The repository source of truth is .agents/skills/iwac-mcp/; keep project-local copies there rather than duplicating the same skill under .claude/.

What it gives Claude

27 possible read-only tools across six IWAC subsets. 25 work out of the box; the 2 semantic_search_* tools are optional and require a free Google/Gemini API key (disabled by default). All keyword and filter matching is accent- and case-insensitive. The unified search/fetch pair and the stats tools also return MCP structured content (outputSchema + structuredContent), which the ChatGPT connector contract requires.

| Group | Tools | | ------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Cross-subset | search, fetch | | Articles | search_articles, get_article, semantic_search_articles | | Sentiment | search_by_sentiment, get_sentiment_distribution | | Index | search_index, get_index_entry, list_subjects, list_locations, list_persons | | Stats | get_collection_stats, get_newspaper_stats, get_country_comparison, get_temporal_distribution | | Publications | search_publications, list_periodicals, get_publication_fulltext, semantic_search_publications | | References | search_references, get_reference | | Other | search_documents, get_document, search_audiovisual, list_audiovisual, get_audiovisual |

The three full-text tools — get_article, get_document, and get_publication_fulltext — optionally take a keyword to return ~2000-char excerpts around each match, so Claude reads just the relevant passages of a long article, archival document, or periodical issue instead of the whole OCR.

Every result object includes a url field pointing at the canonical IWAC record, e.g. https://islam.zmo.de/s/afrique_ouest/item/28576.

About the collection

IWAC is a digital archive focused on Islam and Muslims in West Africa:

• 12,000+ newspaper articles from Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger,

and Togo, 1960s–present (mostly French), each with an AI abstract and Gemini sentiment analysis (polarity / centrality / subjectivity)

• 4,700+ authority records (persons, organisations, places, events, subjects)
• 1,500+ Islamic publications (periodical issues, books) with full OCR
• 860+ academic references, half with abstracts
• Archival documents and Nigerian audiovisual materials

Develop

The bundle lives under [mcpb/](mcpb/). See [mcpb/README.md](mcpb/README.md) for the build / pack workflow.

cd mcpb
npm install
node scripts/install-duckdb-bindings.mjs
npm run typecheck   # tsc --noEmit
npm run build       # esbuild -> single server/index.js
npm test            # unit tests + offline fixture MCP round-trip (no network)
npm run test:live   # full smoke test against the real HF dataset (~250 MB)

CI runs the typecheck, build, unit tests, and the offline fixture test on every push; the live smoke test runs weekly (its pinned counts are the dataset-drift alarm).

Roadmap

See [TODO.md](TODO.md) — near-term: submit to the Anthropic extension directory, sign the bundle with a production code-signing cert, and replace Gemini semantic-search with a free local model.

License

[MIT](LICENSE)

Related

• IWAC Hugging Face Dataset
• IWAC Digital Archive
• Desktop Extensions spec (MCPB)

Source & license

This open-source MCP server is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: fmadore
• Source: fmadore/iwac-mcp-server
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.