Open Notebook (Claude Skill)

Self-hosted, open-source alternative to Google NotebookLM for AI-powered research and document analysis.

Type	Claude Skill
Supplier	K-Dense Inc. (community OSS)
Availability	GA — part of the actively maintained K-Dense scientific-agent-skills collection
Pricing	Free / OSS (MIT)
Capabilities	Read/Write — Claude runs the skill’s Python locally (Bash), not as an MCP tool

How to install

• Claude Code / Claude.ai — Skills CLI (recommended):

  npx skills add K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
  

  Installs the K-Dense collection; enable the open-notebook skill when prompted. Works across Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex via the Agent Skills spec (requires Node ≥ 18).

• Claude Code / Claude Desktop — manual clone:

  git clone https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
  cp -r scientific-agent-skills/skills/open-notebook ~/.claude/skills/
  

  Project-scoped alternative: copy into .claude/skills/ instead of ~/.claude/skills/. The skill declares its own Python dependencies in its SKILL.md; install them (the K-Dense skills generally use uv / pip) when prompted on first use.

What it does

Self-hosted, open-source alternative to Google NotebookLM for AI-powered research and document analysis. Use when organizing research materials into notebooks, ingesting diverse content sources (PDFs, videos, audio, web pages, Office documents), generating AI-powered notes and summaries, creating multi-speaker podcasts from research, chatting with documents using context-aware AI, searching across materials with full-text and vector search, or running custom content transformations. Supports 16+ AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Ollama, Groq, and Mistral with complete data privacy through self-hosting.

Primary use cases: organizing research materials into notebooks, ingesting diverse content sources (PDFs, videos, audio, web pages, Office documents), generating AI-powered notes and summaries, creating multi-speaker podcasts from research, chatting with documents using context-aware AI, searching across materials with full-text and vector search, or running custom content transformations.

Notes

Distributed as a SKILL.md (plus code examples) in the K-Dense collection — Claude executes it locally via Bash/Python rather than as an MCP server. Upstream license: MIT. The skill name to enable after install is open-notebook.

Sources

• K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
• skills/open-notebook/SKILL.md

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