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Digital library · Slovak University of Technology

Your library,
open in the browser.

ELVIRA holds a university’s publications — textbooks, lecture notes, papers and scanned collections — and makes them searchable, readable and lendable in the browser. It runs a whole university today, and every line of it is open source.

See how it works  Browse the source

In production across the Slovak University of Technology and at KU Ružomberok · free for the academic community

elvira.stuba.sk
The ELVIRA catalog — a grid of publication covers with search
What you can do

A library that keeps up with how you actually read

Everything happens in the browser — finding a title, reading it, borrowing it and citing it. No queues, no reader software, no copy sitting on a shared drive.

Read in the browser

Open any title in the built-in reader — search the text, jump between pages, highlight, print or download. No app to install, nothing to configure.

Search across languages

Ask in Slovak and still find matching passages in English, Czech and German. Meaning-based and keyword search run side by side, down to the sentence.

Borrow securely

Borrow, renew and return protected titles with Readium LCP — the same open standard public libraries use. EdRLab certification is in progress.

Cite in one click

Export a citation in BibTeX, BibLaTeX or RIS, or share a single page range instead of passing around the whole file.

The reader

Read it like it’s yours

Every publication opens in the same reader, right where you left off. Search inside the text, page through thumbnails, highlight and annotate, switch to dark mode, and pull out a citation — all without leaving the tab.

  • Full-text search inside the document
  • Highlights, notes and page-range sharing
  • Citation export & download when it’s allowed
elvira.stuba.sk/reader
The ELVIRA reader with a book open, page thumbnails along the bottom

Ask the library a question

In development

An assistant that reads the collection answers in plain language and links back to the exact passage it drew from — so you can check the source, not just trust the summary. It runs today in our development environment and is rolling out to the academic community.

Where it runs

Two universities, one codebase

The same catalog and reader run at both — the portal just wears each campus’s colours. This isn’t a demo: real students borrow real books here every day.

Slovak University of TechnologySince 2020

Slovak University of Technology

Bratislava

The whole university, one instance. Built at the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies (FIIT) — the STU faculty behind most of the project — and rolled out campus-wide.

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Catholic University in RužomberokSince 2024

Catholic University in Ružomberok

Ružomberok

A second home. The same catalog and reader underneath, re-themed in KU’s colours for their students and staff.

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Open source

Built in the open at FIIT STU

The catalog, the reader and the wire protocol are all public and permissively licensed. ELVIRA speaks the standards e-readers already know — OPDS for catalogs, Readium LCP for lending — so nothing here is locked to us. It’s open source, and we help faculties and universities run it.

 Browse the sourceRead the docs

Could your library run on this?

ELVIRA is free to stand up and built on standards e-readers already speak. Start with the docs, or read how it grew from a side project into a campus library.

Read the docs The story
In production at
Slovak University of TechnologyCatholic University in Ružomberok