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Open source · FIIT STU

An open digital library
for universities.

ELVIRA is an OPDS publication catalog, a web portal and an embeddable PDF viewer. Two Slovak universities run it in production; the code, the protocol and the infrastructure are all on GitHub.

Explore the ecosystem Source on GitHub
SpeaksOPDS 1.2OPDS 2.0Readium LCPRWPMLSD
  • 0open-source repos
  • 0background workers
  • 0open standards spoken
  • 0universities running it
What it does

A library that understands its own content

ELVIRA is more than a catalog. A pipeline of AI workers extracts text, tables, figures and formulas from each publication, embeds them with multilingual models, and exposes the result through semantic search, an AI assistant and standards-based lending.

Read

Embedded PDF viewer with annotation layer, BibTeX / RIS citation export and page-range sharing. Works for born-digital PDFs and OCR-recovered scans.

Search

Multilingual semantic search over the full corpus. A Slovak query finds relevant passages in English, Czech and German literature. An AI assistant answers questions over library content with passage-level citations.

Lend

OPDS 1.2 and 2.0 distribution. End-to-end Readium LCP lending — borrow, reserve, renew, return — with EdRLab certification in progress.

Architecture

How the pieces fit

The interactive ecosystem map shows every component, every dependency edge and every standard ELVIRA implements. Useful if you’re deciding what to extend, fork or replace.

Open the map
In production

Two universities, one codebase

ELVIRA runs at two Slovak universities today. The portal handles per-site theming and configuration; the catalog underneath is the same software.

STU BratislavaSlovak University of Technology in Bratislava

Primary production deployment. ELVIRA runs STU-wide; FIIT STU is the home faculty where the project is developed (instance at elvira.fiit.stuba.sk).

KU RužomberokCatholic University in Ružomberok (Katolícka univerzita v Ružomberku)

Second deployment site. Portal themed for KU, same catalog software underneath.

Run your own deployment

Container images, deployment manifests and the OpenAPI protocol are all public. License is MIT (BSD-3-Clause for the Readium fork). Pull requests welcome.

 Source code Read the docs