Machine Library for Hermes Agent

Research search for Hermes's built-in web_search and web_extract tools. Machine Library searches papers, books, patents, standards and Wikipedia, and returns reranked results with links to a stable document page, so Hermes can cite where a claim comes from.

• web_search: results from the scholarly corpus. Each result has the title, document type, authors, publisher and year, the best-matching passage, the canonical source identifier (for example doi://10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762 or iso://1219-1:2012), and a https://machinelibrary.ai/r/... page link.
• web_extract: full text, up to 20,000 characters, for Machine Library document pages and for source links Machine Library can resolve (DOI and doi.org links, arXiv, standard identifiers). Other URLs fail one by one with a clear message. Pair Machine Library with a general extract backend for the open web.

Install

hermes plugins install machine-library

Hermes asks for MACHINELIBRARY_API_KEY. Create a key at https://machinelibrary.ai/keys; searches use prepaid credits.

Then select the backend with hermes tools, or in ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

web:
  backend: machine-library

To keep a general web backend for pages and use Machine Library only for search:

web:
  search_backend: machine-library
  extract_backend: firecrawl

Pricing

Requests are billed to your Machine Library balance:

• Search: $0.01 plus $0.001 per result, so about $0.015 for Hermes's default 5 results.
• Extract: $0.003 per 4,096 tokens of returned text.

See https://machinelibrary.ai/pricing.

What this plugin does on your machine

• Network: sends search queries and URLs to extract to https://api.machinelibrary.ai, operated by Space Frontiers, with your API key. Nothing else is contacted.
• Credentials: reads MACHINELIBRARY_API_KEY only through Hermes's agent.secret_scope.get_secret. It never reads .env or other credential files.
• No telemetry, background processes, shell commands or local file access. Standard library only; no Python dependencies.

Machine Library's privacy policy: https://machinelibrary.ai/privacy/world.

MCP alternative

Machine Library also runs a hosted MCP server at https://mcp.machinelibrary.ai, with in-document passage search, public-discussion search and research answers. Add it under mcp_servers in ~/.hermes/config.yaml; it signs in with OAuth or an Authorization: Bearer <API key> header.

Development

pytest tests          # offline; needs hermes-agent importable (PYTHONPATH)
hermes plugins validate --install-deps .

License

MIT