Keeping work separate

memo-mcp gives you two ways to keep things apart: shelves inside one memory, and separate memories.

Shelves: topics within one memory

A shelf is a label for a group of documents, such as billing, infrastructure or grpc-docs. Questions search every shelf unless you say otherwise, so shelves organise without hiding anything.

Save this on the billing shelf.

Only look on the infrastructure shelf.

Use shelves for topics within one project or team.

Separate memories: one per project or client

Each memory is its own file. Nothing in one can be found from another. Use separate memories when the contents must not mix, for example for different clients, or for work and personal notes.

The memory’s name is set when you connect memo-mcp to Claude. It is the MEMO_KB value in Quick start, step 2. To add a second memory, add memo-mcp again under another name:

claude mcp add memo-client-b --env MEMO_KB=client-b -- ~/bin/memo-mcp

In Claude Code, you can also set a memory per project folder, so each project automatically gets its own. The operator guide shows how.