Städel Museum MCP Server

<p align="center"> <img src="assets/staedel-museum.webp" alt="Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main" width="640" /> </p>

A Model Context Protocol server that gives AI assistants direct access to the [Städel Museum](https://www.staedelmuseum.de) Digital Collection. It talks to the museum's public OAI-PMH interface (LIDO metadata format), so an assistant can harvest object records, read rich multilingual metadata, and display high-resolution artwork images — with an interactive browsing UI (MCP Apps) on top.

This is a personal portfolio project built to demonstrate working with the Model Context Protocol, an OAI-PMH/LIDO harvesting API, and MCP Apps interactive UIs end-to-end — not an official Städel Museum product.

Features

Because the Städel exposes its collection through OAI-PMH (a harvesting protocol, not a search engine), there is no full-text keyword search — you filter by set and/or date range, then fetch full details per object. The tool descriptions make this explicit so the assistant doesn't assume Google-style search is available.

<p align="center"> <img src="assets/mcp-inspector-tools.png" alt="Tools listed in the MCP Inspector" width="800" /> </p>

Architecture

src/
├── index.ts      # entry point: stdio, or stateless Streamable HTTP with --http
├── server.ts     # the four tools and the explorer UI resource
├── api.ts        # OAI-PMH client: throttled fetch, retry, XML parsing
├── lido.ts       # flattens a LIDO record into the normalized object (and its Zod schema)
└── explorer.ts   # the self-contained MCP App HTML for the explorer

lido.ts does the interesting work: LIDO is a verbose, multilingual, deeply nested XML format, and flattenLido turns it into a small, stable JSON shape — resolving xml:lang variants (preferring English, falling back to German), picking the largest image rendition, and reading each object's actual rights statement instead of assuming one blanket license.

Licensing & Attribution (important)

• Metadata harvested from the OAI-PMH interface is CC0 1.0 (public domain).
• Images are typically CC BY-SA 4.0 Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, though some objects

carry a different rights statement (e.g. Public Domain Mark) — get-museum-object reports the actual license for each object rather than hard-coding one.

• Whenever an assistant displays or describes an image from this server, it should include the

credit line reported in the license field.

Prerequisites

• Node.js v18 or later
• pnpm (via corepack)

Installation

git clone https://github.com/topoftheblock/staedel-mcp.git
cd staedel-mcp
corepack enable
pnpm install
pnpm run build

Running

Stdio (used by Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and most MCP clients):

node dist/index.js

Streamable HTTP (for testing with clients that connect over HTTP):

node dist/index.js --http
# -> http://localhost:3001/mcp  (localhost only; override the port with the PORT env var)

Add it to Claude Desktop / Claude Code

Add to your MCP client's config (e.g. claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "staedel-museum": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/staedel-mcp/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Try it with the MCP Inspector

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node dist/index.js

<p align="center"> <img src="assets/mcp-inspector-list-sets-result.png" alt="list-sets tool result in the MCP Inspector" width="800" /> </p>

Development

pnpm run watch   # tsc --watch
pnpm run check   # type-check without emitting

Configuration

Reference

• Städel Digital Collection OAI-PMH guide
• LIDO metadata schema
• Model Context Protocol
• MCP Apps