metmuseum

The Met Museum MCP Server provides tools to explore The Met collection through natural language style prompts. It exposes a set of MCP tools including list-departments to enumerate all museum departments, search-museum-objects to query artworks by terms and filters, get-museum-object to fetch detailed data about a specific object (with optional image), and open-met-explorer to launch an interactive browsing app within MCP clients. You can run the server via the npx command and then use these tools within your agent or chat client to discover artworks, refine results, and retrieve object details and imagery. The server supports both stdio transport for desktop clients and a Streamable HTTP transport for web-enabled clients when started with appropriate flags.

Prerequisites:

• Node.js v18 or later
• npm (comes with Node.js) or pnpm if you prefer

Installation steps:

1. Ensure Node.js is installed (visit https://nodejs.org/ and install the LTS release).
2. Run the MCP server directly without installing globally:

npx -y metmuseum-mcp

This starts the server using stdio transport by default. If you want to enable the HTTP transport, start with the http flag or use the appropriate configuration as described in the README (see Streamable HTTP Transport section):

npx -y metmuseum-mcp --http

3) Optionally, install locally from source if you are developing or testing changes:

```bash
git clone https://github.com/mikechao/metmuseum-mcp.git
cd metmuseum-mcp
pnpm install
pnpm run build
node dist/index.js --http

Prerequisites recap:

• Node.js v18+
• Access to npm or pnpm as desired
• Network access to fetch the MCP package from npm when using npx

Environment variables:

• MET_API_TIMEOUT_MS: Adjust the timeout for outbound Met API requests. Default is 10000 ms.
• MET_API_DEBUG: Enable verbose debug logs for API/schema validation failures (values like 1, true, yes, on are truthy).

Transport tips:

• The default stdio transport is suitable for most MCP desktop clients (Claude Desktop, LibreChat MCP, etc.).
• To expose an HTTP endpoint for Streamable HTTP transport, run with the --http option (or equivalent as shown in the Transport section of the README). The HTTP server defaults to http://localhost:3001/mcp but can be configured via PORT and HOST env vars.

Common issues:

• If you see transport negotiation errors, ensure you are using a compatible MCP client that supports stdio or the HTTP transport as applicable.
• If image data is missing for get-museum-object, verify the object has Open Access media; some objects may not include an image.
• When using Open Met Explorer App, you can pass initial search terms via q to seed results.