Dracor MCP for LLM integration with Claude

[stijn-meijers]

Hi all, I have created a Dracor MCP server for Anthropic's Claude. It allows you to ask questions about data in Dracor. Let me know what you think!

I am in contact with Lucas van der Deijl to see whether this is something useful, but in the meantime feel free to test and do a PR if you see improvements.

Best,

Stijn

see: (https://github.com/stijn-meijers/dracor-mcp)

[ingoboerner]

Hi, wow! We are all stunned. Can we setup a Zoom meeting and you demo it?

[stijn-meijers]

Sure thing! Does Wednesday 26 between 16:00 and 17:00 work? You can send the invite to stijn@wolk.work; if the date/time doesn't work we can find some other date through mail.

[ingoboerner]

Hi, I chatted with colleagues yesterday, they are all thrilled and want to know more. I am afraid, we have to doodle to find a date/time. I will contact you via email.

Meanwhile, I looked at the code and I think, there are some issues with the DraCor API that we could improve on our end, e.g.

• Provide a "real" full text representation of a play:
  see https://github.com/stijn-meijers/dracor-mcp/blob/f5df26d2cbaad8c37d8e11ff108344517733825c/dracor_mcp_fastmcp.py#L165-L177

Because DraCor does not offer a full text endpoint, you have to feed the model not the "real" text of a play with interwoven speech acts and stage directions, but all speeches followed by all stage directions. Obviously, the model has a wrong textual representation of the text of a play, not only are stage directions not embedded in the text, there are also possibly crucial parts of the text missing like headings of acts and scenes, that are in the TEI-XML, but are stripped, when requesting speeches or stage directions. The model also never sees the dramatis personae of a play (cast list) with descriptions of characters.

#281

Here you have to use regular expressions to "clean" the TEI-XML: https://github.com/stijn-meijers/dracor-mcp/blob/f5df26d2cbaad8c37d8e11ff108344517733825c/dracor_mcp_fastmcp.py#L621-L634 We could generate these data with xQuery in the database more easily and provide it. (You know the meme: https://preview.redd.it/k6sded6b9mkz.png?auto=webp&s=e2e8387aaa1fec320f9151f609f402846c5c2487)

• Provide a way to efficiently filter all plays by certain criteria (e.g. https://github.com/stijn-meijers/dracor-mcp/blob/f5df26d2cbaad8c37d8e11ff108344517733825c/dracor_mcp_fastmcp.py#L222-L230)

• You have to send a lot of request to the API to assemble a list of all plays in all corpora here, we probably could do that with the XML database more efficiently and maybe even cache it, to have such a query run faster
  https://github.com/stijn-meijers/dracor-mcp/blob/f5df26d2cbaad8c37d8e11ff108344517733825c/dracor_mcp_fastmcp.py#L241-L258

• Provide a way to get all characters of plays in all corpora (which could be cached on our side):
  You have to send several requests to the API to get all characters of all plays in the database. We could probably do that more efficiently in the XML-database. https://github.com/stijn-meijers/dracor-mcp/blob/f5df26d2cbaad8c37d8e11ff108344517733825c/dracor_mcp_fastmcp.py#L621-L634

• Pre-generate better information on the structure of plays and expose them: https://github.com/stijn-meijers/dracor-mcp/blob/f5df26d2cbaad8c37d8e11ff108344517733825c/dracor_mcp_fastmcp.py#L548-L562 For example, there are also other types (or labels) of segments than acts and scenes.

• Provide a Full Text Search endpoint (I just put that here because we from DraCor discuss this from time to time..)

A note:

• There should always be a TEI available – this is our source, without TEI there is nothing else: https://github.com/stijn-meijers/dracor-mcp/blob/f5df26d2cbaad8c37d8e11ff108344517733825c/dracor_mcp_fastmcp.py#L658

Thanks again for the great work!

[stijn-meijers]

Sounds good! Let's go over these in the call - I'll show you how I set it up and how it works now. Fair warning though: I have little to no knowledge about the actual contents of Dracor, I just know how to make these kinds of integrations, so don't expect too much reflection/insights on that side from me ;)

I just hope it is somewhat useful for you and gives you a nice starting point to improve upon!

Send me the doodle poll and I'll give you some dates!

[ingoboerner]

Hi, just a small update on this: I reworked the MCP and added some additional tools (we now have some 30 tools).
The MCP server also now provides some limited access to DraCor's documentation. We will continue evaluating it.

[stijn-meijers]

That sounds great! It is now quite easy to deploy remote servers as well: https://developers.cloudflare.com/agents/guides/remote-mcp-server/ Might be interesting for you to check out! Best, Stijn Meijers Data @ Wolk<https://wolk.work/> 0634187486 From: Ingo Börner ***@***.***> Date: Thursday, 15 May 2025 at 16:49 To: dracor-org/dracor-api ***@***.***> Cc: Stijn Meijers ***@***.***>, Author ***@***.***> Subject: Re: [dracor-org/dracor-api] Dracor MCP for LLM integration with Claude (Discussion #292) Hi, just a small update on this: I reworked the MCP and added some additional tools (we now have some 30 tools). The MCP server also now provides some limited access to DraCor's documentation. We will continue evaluating it. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#292 (comment)>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ATDC6K2QEPDUAM5LJEUHK2L26SSNJAVCNFSM6AAAAABZOAEQJ2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTGMJWGAYDGMA>. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[ingoboerner]

Hi, @stijn-meijers, I managed to run the mcp-server in a Docker container (which still sometime produces a strange bug I still have to wrap my head around) and I even could deploy to AWS (using sse and streamable-http). I can connect to the remote servers with the MCP Inspector without any problems, but not with Claude Desktop. I use the https://github.com/geelen/mcp-remote which works locally (connect to the Docker container on localhost) but not remotely. Are there other options to connect CLaude Desktop to Remote MCP servers? THis stills seems to be a very experimental/hacky thing to do..

[stijn-meijers]

Hey @ingoboerner, That sounds great!

For remote MCPs with Claude Desktop the feature is in Beta for paying users: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11175166-about-custom-integrations-using-remote-mcp

I haven't used it myself yet honestly, so I guess this documentation is as far as my knowledge goes. You are on the cutting edge! ;)