Video History Project MCP Server

by videohistoryproject Your server? Claim it

answering

Video History Project is answering right now. Last checked 9 min ago. It exposes 6 tools.

Search experimental video history, read public records, follow sources and export citations.

Uptime history 4 days of history · worst day 97%

4 days agonow

98.9%

Uptime 24h

90 of 91 checks

Tools

read from the server

771 ms

Response time

average over 24h

open, no key

Access

streamable-http

Video History Project does not always answer

Over the last week it answered 98.5% 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 9 min ago.

Claude Code Claude Desktop Codex Cursor VS Code

run in your terminal

claude mcp add research --transport http https://www.videohistoryproject.org/mcp

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

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "research": {
      "url": "https://www.videohistoryproject.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

~/.codex/config.toml

[mcp_servers.research]
url = "https://www.videohistoryproject.org/mcp"

.cursor/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "research": {
      "url": "https://www.videohistoryproject.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

.vscode/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "research": {
      "url": "https://www.videohistoryproject.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 6

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

describe

describe_collection

Describe the Video History Project collection, searchable text, filters, citation practices and response limits. Useful when beginning research.

export

export_citations

Export citations for 1–25 VHP IDs or URLs. format is text or ris; target is publication (the cataloged work) or page (the VHP web page). Missing publication metadata returns a per-item error; choose page to cite a biography or history page.

record

get_record

Read a public VHP record by ID or VHP URL, resolving old addresses locally. Returns metadata, source links, citations and a section of existing text. Default section is body; choose other section names from sections. Follow content.nextOffset with the same section and version for complete text. Linked scans are not read.

records

search_records

Search public VHP records by words or quoted phrases. Empty query browses. Combine exact author/subject keys from list_terms, recorded years and a type from describe_collection. Follow nextPage. Excerpts label their source; read get_record before quoting.

get_related_records

Get the site's existing similarity suggestions for a public record. These are research leads, not evidence of a historical relationship. May return no suggestions when the index has none or the editor has disabled them.

terms

list_terms

Find catalog author or subject filter keys by part of a name. Returns exact keys, display labels and counts of discoverable records. field is author or subject. Follow nextPage; use a returned key in search_records.

Endpoints

URL	Transport	State	Latency	Checked
https://www.videohistoryproject.org/mcp	streamable-http	answering	555 ms	9 min ago

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Video History Project — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Video History Project do?

It exposes 6 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: describe_collection, export_citations, get_record, get_related_records, list_terms, search_records. 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 Video History Project working right now?

We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 90 of 91 checks got a reply (98.9%), average response time 771 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.

How do I connect Video History Project?

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 Video History Project need an API key?

No. Video History Project completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 6 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.

How fast is Video History Project?

It answers our handshake in 771 ms on average, which is faster than 16% of all working MCP servers we measure. That is on the slow side — worth knowing if the tool sits inside an interactive loop. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.