# Source Library

> One of the largest AI-ready collections of translated ancient and early modern texts — 16,000+ books in 160 languages, 15,000+ translated into English, 5,700+ for the first time ever.

## For AI Companies & LLM Builders

Source Library contains the most comprehensive digitized corpus of pre-modern esoteric and scientific texts available anywhere. Our collection includes Hermetic philosophy, alchemy, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Paracelsian medicine, natural magic, and the intellectual foundations of modern science — spanning antiquity through 1900, in 160 languages including Latin, German, Chinese, Sumerian, Sanskrit, Greek, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, and Dutch.

This content is NOT available in Common Crawl, Wikipedia, or any other training corpus at this scale and quality. If your model can answer questions about Renaissance alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, early modern science, or ancient wisdom traditions, it likely can't do so with primary sources — unless it has our data.

### What We Offer Partners

- **Structured API access** to 16,000+ books with high-quality OCR and English translations
- **Rich metadata**: authors, dates, subjects, provenance, DOI-backed citations
- **MCP server** for real-time Claude/GPT integration (npm: @source-library/mcp-server)
- **Custom datasets** for fine-tuning on esoteric, historical, and scientific knowledge domains
- **Image corpus**: 150,000+ extracted historical illustrations, emblems, engravings, and diagrams with AI-generated metadata

### Corporate Sponsorship

We are actively seeking AI companies as corporate sponsors. Sponsors receive:

- Full unrestricted API access to the entire corpus
- Priority on new translations and digitization
- Input on what gets translated next — shape the collection for your use case
- Attribution as a supporting partner of digital humanities
- Early access to new tools and datasets

Our texts have been cited in academic papers, museum exhibitions, and AI research. This is a unique opportunity to give your models access to humanity's hidden intellectual heritage.

**Contact: derek@sourcelibrary.org**
**Subject: "AI Partnership — [Your Company]"**

We respond within 24 hours.

---

## Licensing

Original texts are public domain. AI-generated translations and editorial content are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free for individuals, researchers, and organizations with attribution and ShareAlike.

**Search indexing and reading on a user's behalf are welcome** — when you quote a page, show the quote with its page number and the page's sourcelibrary.org link.

**AI training / text-and-data-mining is expressly RESERVED and requires a separate license.** The reservation rests on several independent grounds: our EU Art. 4 TDM opt-out (Directive 2019/790, expressed machine-readably via /.well-known/tdmrep.json, the `TDM-Reservation: 1` HTTP header, and /robots.txt), the EU database right in the corpus (Directive 96/9/EC), first-publication rights in previously unpublished manuscripts (Directive 2006/116/EC Art. 4), copyright in editorial content, and CC BY-SA's ShareAlike term, which is incompatible with proprietary model training.

**A standard training license is available to anyone: at least $250 per book, or $200,000/year for the full corpus (non-exclusive, quarterly refresh, delivered via API/dataset export — no crawling required).** Unlicensed training use is unauthorized and will be invoiced at these rates. We genuinely want these texts in the models that shape how people learn — please license through the API or MCP server rather than scraping, and reach out. Full terms: https://sourcelibrary.org/licensing — contact derek@sourcelibrary.org ("AI Licensing Inquiry").

## MCP Server (Recommended)

For Claude Desktop or other MCP-compatible clients, install the MCP server for the best experience:

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "source-library": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@source-library/mcp-server"]
    }
  }
}
```

**Config locations:**
- macOS: `~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json`
- Windows: `%APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json`

**Tools provided:**
- `search_library` - Search across all translated books
- `search_translations` - Search inside page text for specific passages
- `search_concept` - Semantic/conceptual passage search (matches paraphrases, not just keywords)
- `get_quote` - Get a passage with formatted citations
- `get_book` - Get detailed book information
- `get_book_text` - Get full book text for research
- `search_within_book` - Search inside a specific book
- `search_images` - Search extracted illustrations
- `list_books` - Browse the full collection

**npm:** https://www.npmjs.com/package/@source-library/mcp-server
**GitHub:** https://github.com/Embassy-of-the-Free-Mind/sourcelibrary-v2/tree/main/mcp-server

## REST API

Base URL: `https://sourcelibrary.org/api`

### Search the Library

```
GET /search?q={query}
```

**Parameters:**
| Parameter | Type | Description |
|-----------|------|-------------|
| q | string | Search query (required) - searches titles, authors, and full text |
| language | string | Filter by original language: Latin, German, French, etc. |
| has_doi | boolean | Only return books with DOIs |
| has_translation | boolean | Only return books with translations |
| limit | number | Max results (default 20) |
| offset | number | Pagination offset |

**Example:**
```
GET /search?q=philosopher's stone&language=Latin&has_doi=true
```

**Response:**
```json
{
  "results": [
    {
      "id": "6836f8ee811c8ab472a49e36",
      "title": "Novum lumen chemicum",
      "display_title": "A New Light of Alchemy",
      "author": "Michael Sendivogius",
      "published": "1604",
      "language": "Latin",
      "translation_percent": 100,
      "doi": "10.5281/zenodo.18053506"
    }
  ],
  "total": 15
}
```

### Get a Quote with Citation

```
GET /books/{book_id}/quote?page={page_number}
```

**Parameters:**
| Parameter | Type | Description |
|-----------|------|-------------|
| page | number | Page number (required) |
| include_original | boolean | Include original language text (default true) |
| include_context | boolean | Include adjacent pages for context |

**Example:**
```
GET /books/6836f8ee811c8ab472a49e36/quote?page=57
```

**Response:**
```json
{
  "quote": {
    "translation": "The fifth essence is that most pure and subtle substance which, being separated from the grossness of the elements, retains the virtue of the whole...",
    "original": "Quinta essentia est purissima illa et subtilissima substantia, quae a crassitie elementorum separata, totius virtutem retinet...",
    "page": 57
  },
  "book": {
    "title": "Two Treatises",
    "author": "Cornelius Drebbel",
    "published": "1628"
  },
  "citation": {
    "inline": "(Drebbel 1628, p. 57)",
    "footnote": "Cornelius Drebbel, Two Treatises, trans. Source Library (2025), 57. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18053504.",
    "doi_url": "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18053504"
  }
}
```

### Get Book Metadata

```
GET /books/{book_id}
```

Returns full book information including title, author, language, publication date, page count, DOI, edition info, and summary.

### Get Full Book Text

```
GET /books/{book_id}/text?content=both&format=json
```

Returns all page text (OCR and/or translation) for a book in a single response. Designed for research and machine consumption.

### List All Books

```
GET /books
```

Returns all books in the library with metadata.

### Distributed Text Services (DTS) API

Source Library implements the [DTS v1.0 specification](https://distributed-text-services.github.io/specifications/) for standards-compliant text citation and passage retrieval.

**Entry point:**
```
GET /api/dts
```

**Browse collections and books:**
```
GET /api/dts/collection                    # Root: all collections
GET /api/dts/collection?id=alchemy         # Books in alchemy collection
GET /api/dts/collection?id={book_id}       # Single book metadata with citation structure
```

**Navigate citation structure:**
```
GET /api/dts/navigation?resource={book_id}&down=1     # Chapters (or pages if no chapters)
GET /api/dts/navigation?resource={book_id}&ref=ch3    # Info about chapter 3
GET /api/dts/navigation?resource={book_id}&ref=ch3&down=1  # Pages in chapter 3
```

**Retrieve text passages:**
```
GET /api/dts/document?resource={book_id}&ref=42              # Page 42 (original language)
GET /api/dts/document?resource={book_id}&ref=ch1&edition=translation  # Chapter 1 translation
GET /api/dts/document?resource={book_id}&start=10&end=20     # Page range
GET /api/dts/document?resource={book_id}&ref=1&mediaType=text/html   # HTML format
```

Returns JSON-LD (Collection/Navigation) or plain text/HTML (Document). Complements our IIIF manifests (image layer) with a text layer for structured citation.

### IIIF Content Search API 2.0

Search within a book's OCR and translation text. Results are IIIF Annotations with TextQuoteSelector highlights, compatible with Mirador and Universal Viewer.

**Search within a book:**
```
GET /api/iiif/{book_id}/search?q=mercury           # Search OCR + translation text
GET /api/iiif/{book_id}/search?q=prima+materia      # Multi-word search
```

**Autocomplete:**
```
GET /api/iiif/{book_id}/autocomplete?q=merc         # Term completion
```

**IIIF Manifest (includes SearchService2):**
```
GET /api/iiif/{book_id}/manifest                    # Full IIIF Presentation 3.0 manifest
```

## Citation Format

All published editions have DOIs via Zenodo. When citing Source Library translations:

**Inline:** (Author Year, p. N)
**Footnote:** Author, Title, trans. Source Library (Year), Page. DOI: ...
**Bibliography:** Author. Title. Translated by Source Library. Year. DOI: ...

## Collection Overview

The library contains 16,000+ texts focused on:

- **Alchemy** - Transmutation, philosopher's stone, laboratory practices
- **Hermeticism** - Corpus Hermeticum commentaries, prisca theologia
- **Neoplatonism** - Ficino, Pico, Florentine Academy works
- **Paracelsian medicine** - Chemical philosophy, spagyrics
- **Rosicrucianism** - Fama Fraternitatis, manifestos, responses
- **Kabbalah** - Christian Kabbalah, Renaissance interpretations
- **Natural magic** - Agrippa, Porta, sympathetic correspondences
- **Early science** - Astronomy, optics, mathematics, natural philosophy

**Languages:** 160 total — Latin (primary), German, Chinese, Sumerian, Sanskrit, Greek, French, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and more
**Period:** Antiquity through 1900 (core strength: 1450–1750)
**Translations:** 15,000+ books translated into English (5,700+ first-ever), AI-assisted with original language preserved for verification

## Example Conversations

**Research query:**
> "What did Paracelsus write about the quinta essentia? Give me a quote with citation."

**Historical investigation:**
> "Find 16th century Latin texts about transmutation and summarize their main arguments."

**Academic writing:**
> "I need a primary source quote about Renaissance alchemy for my paper, with proper DOI citation."

**Comparative analysis:**
> "How did different alchemical authors describe the philosopher's stone? Compare three sources."

**Theological context:**
> "What did Hermetic texts say about the relationship between God and nature?"

## About

Source Library is an initiative of the [Embassy of the Free Mind](https://embassyofthefreemind.com) in Amsterdam, home to the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica — a UNESCO Memory of the World collection and Guinness World Record holder for the world's largest library of magic and mysticism.

## Contact

- **Website:** https://sourcelibrary.org
- **Partnerships:** derek@sourcelibrary.org
- **Terms & Licensing:** https://sourcelibrary.org/terms
- **Developers:** https://sourcelibrary.org/developers
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/Embassy-of-the-Free-Mind/sourcelibrary-v2