Third-Party MCP Servers

Introduction to Model Context Protocol (MCP)

James Chapman

AI Curriculum Manager, DataCamp

Why Use Third-Party MCP Servers?

Speed: filesystem and database access without writing a server

Why Use Third-Party MCP Servers?

Speed: filesystem and database access without writing a server
Maintained by others: you focus on the client and application
Integration: client code can be shared and reused for different MCP servers

¹ https://www.snowflake.com/en/developers/guides/getting-started-with-snowflake-mcp-server/

Considerations Before Using a Third-Party Server

Trust: the server runs code and may call external APIs → check these sources
Security: requires careful management of private data and credentials
Surface area: more tools mean more the LLM can do; be aware of what each server exposes

Open Library MCP

mcp-open-library: MCP server for the Internet Archive Open Library API
Tools: get_book_by_title, get_authors_by_name, get_book_cover, get_book_by_id, ...
No API key

¹ https://github.com/8enSmith/mcp-open-library

Accessing the Open Library MCP

from mcp import ClientSession, StdioServerParameters
from mcp.client.stdio import stdio_client

params = StdioServerParameters(
    command="open-library-server",
    args=[]
)

¹ https://github.com/8enSmith/mcp-open-library?tab=readme-ov-file#installation

Using the Open Library MCP

params = StdioServerParameters(command="open-library-server", args=[])


async with stdio_client(params) as (reader, writer):
    async with ClientSession(reader, writer) as session:
        await session.initialize()

        response = await session.list_tools()
        print("Tools:", [t.name for t in response.tools])
        result = await session.call_tool("get_book_by_title", {"title": "Dune"})
        text = result.content[0].text
        print("Tool Call Result:", text)

Tools: ['get_book_by_title', 'get_authors_by_name', 'get_author_info',
'get_author_photo', 'get_book_cover', 'get_book_by_id']


Tool Call Result: [
  {
    "title": "Dune",
    "authors": [
      "Frank Herbert"
    ],
    "first_publish_year": 1965,
    ...
  },
  ...

Let's practice!

Introduction to Model Context Protocol (MCP)