Archives, libraries and museum collections your AI assistant can search

Historians, art historians and genealogists spend much of their time moving between catalogues that each have their own search syntax. Kahubi connects to national archives such as Riksarkivet and Kansallisarkisto, digitised newspaper collections in Sweden, Norway, France and the Netherlands, union catalogues like Libris and Open Library, and the open collections of major museums.

Ask in plain language, in the language of the sources if you like, and the assistant runs the right query in each database. Answers quote reference codes, ARK links, inventory numbers and dates, so you can open the original page scan or catalogue record before you cite it.

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16 sources you can connect

Questions researchers ask these sources

  • “Search the transcribed court records for mentions of trolldom in Dalarna between 1660 and 1680 and list the reference codes.”

    Matching passages from handwriting-recognised pages, each with its archive reference code and a link to the page image, plus a note where the transcription looks unreliable.

    Riksarkivet

  • “Search the Turku town court records of the 1650s for cases of slander (ärekränkning) and give me the volume and page for each.”

    Court-record pages in the original Swedish, each cited by series, volume signum, year and page, with a link to the page image in Astia.

    Kansallisarkisto

  • “Find digitised photographs of Nordic fishing villages from before 1920 that are free to reuse.”

    Items with title, creator, date, holding institution, rights statement and a link to each record.

    Europeana

  • “How did Australian newspapers report the 1918 influenza epidemic in its first month?”

    Digitised newspaper articles with title, date and page, linked to the Trove record.

    Trove

  • “Which Swedish doctoral theses on folk high schools (folkhögskolor) have been published since 2000?”

    Libris records with title, author, year, publisher and record link, so you can see which libraries hold each thesis.

    Libris

  • “How did Swedish newspapers write about kolera in the 1830s compared with the 1850s?”

    Concordance hits per decade with newspaper title, date and the surrounding sentence, plus total counts so you can compare frequency across periods.

    Kubhist historical newspapers

Frequently asked questions

Can the assistant read handwritten or old printed documents?
It reads the text the archive itself provides: handwriting-recognised transcriptions where the archive has them (Riksarkivet, Kansallisarkisto) and OCR text for digitised newspapers and books. It quotes that text with the reference code and flags passages where the recognition looks unreliable, so you can check the scan.
Do I need an account at each archive?
No. These sources are free and open, and Kahubi connects to them without a key. You only connect each source once under Settings, Integrations, Data sources.
Can I search in Swedish, French or Dutch?
Yes. Searching in the language of the documents gives the best recall in full-text collections. You can ask in English and tell the assistant which terms to use, or ask in the source language directly.

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How MCP grounds AI answers in real records

Search archives & heritage sources in one research chat

Free to start. Connect a source in one click and get answers that cite the records they came from.

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