Reading Room MCP Server

by randpaulcovid Your server? Claim it

not responding

Reading Room is listed as active in the registry but did not answer our last check. It exposes 7 tools.

Search the U.S. Senate's subpoenaed COVID-19 records: 18,094 communications, each page-cited.

Uptime history 49 days of history · worst day 0%

49 days agonow

0.0%

Uptime 24h

0 of 92 checks

Tools

read from the server

156 ms

Response time

average over 24h

open, no key

Access

streamable-http

Reading Room does not always answer

Over the last week it answered 0.0% of our checks. We check every 15 minutes, so you hear about the next outage within the hour — not from your users.

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 0 min ago.

Claude Code Claude Desktop Codex Cursor VS Code

run in your terminal

claude mcp add reading-room --transport http https://randpaulcovid.org/mcp

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "reading-room": {
      "url": "https://randpaulcovid.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

~/.codex/config.toml

[mcp_servers.reading-room]
url = "https://randpaulcovid.org/mcp"

.cursor/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "reading-room": {
      "url": "https://randpaulcovid.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

.vscode/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "reading-room": {
      "url": "https://randpaulcovid.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 7

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

concept

get_concept

Fetch a concept document from the OKF bundle — frontmatter and body — with every cross-link rewritten to an absolute URL, so the bundle can be traversed from what this returns. A person carries activity, correspondents, organization and a chronological statement timeline; a topic carries its principal voices; a source carries provenance and SHA-256. Accepts a slug (anthony-s-fauci), a bundle path (people/anthony-s-fauci.md), a person_id from the site or JSON API (anthony_s_fauci), or a display name (Anthony S. Fauci).

concepts

search_concepts

Search the analysis layer: one cross-linked document per person, organization, topic, released package, media outlet and substantial conversation, each carrying provenance back to the pages it derives from. Use this when the question is who someone is, what a topic covers, or what a package contains — rather than which records match a string, which is search_records. Matches names, aliases and descriptions; get_concept then returns one in full.

fetch

fetch

Retrieve the full text of one item by id. Accepts a doc_id from search (fauci_diary:entry:00026) and also an OKF concept id (anthony-s-fauci), so a person, organization or topic document can be read the same way. Every response carries the citation to the page of the Committee's PDF it came from.

pages

search_pages

Literal search over the OCR text of all 5,247 pages, before segmentation into records. This is the completeness layer: it reaches duplicate copies and pages no record covers, and matches across a whole page rather than within a chunk. Use it to settle whether a phrase appears in the corpus at all — a miss here is much stronger evidence of absence than a miss in search_records, though OCR error and page-spanning lines still make it imperfect.

record

get_record

Retrieve a single communication in full by doc_id, with its citation, participants and neighbouring messages where it sits in a conversation.

records

search_records

Find communications matching a question or phrase. Returns records with speaker, date, grade and a citation to the page of the Committee's PDF. Retrieval only: nothing is summarised, and a record's wording is the record's, not this server's.

search

Search 18,094 communications from the U.S. Senate HSGAC COVID-19 releases. Returns id, title, excerpt and URL for each match; pass an id to fetch for the full text. This is the standard search contract — search_records offers keyword mode for exact strings and control over quoted material, and search_pages searches the raw OCR text, which is what settles whether something is absent from the corpus.

Endpoints

URL	Transport	State	Latency	Checked
https://randpaulcovid.org/mcp	streamable-http	answering	156 ms	0 min ago

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Reading Room — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Reading Room do?

It exposes 7 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: fetch, get_concept, get_record, search, search_concepts, search_pages and 1 more. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →

Is Reading Room working right now?

We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 0 of 92 checks got a reply (0.0%), average response time 156 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.

The registry lists Reading Room as active — why does it not respond?

The official MCP registry stores what the author submitted; it does not verify that the server still runs. We check the endpoint ourselves, and this one does not answer. Catalogues that copy the registry without checking will show it as working.

How do I connect Reading Room?

Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.

Does Reading Room need an API key?

No. Reading Room completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 7 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.