From a side project to a campus library
A backup that got out of hand
Jakub was procrastinating on his master’s thesis when an OS reinstall wiped his entire Calibre library. He wanted a centralized Calibre backend so it couldn’t happen again. That backend became EvilFlowersCatalog.
The first team
A FIIT STU student team took the side project and turned it into a real platform — a proper catalog, a portal, a reader. Where ELVIRA as we know it actually started.
Handed down, team to team
Each academic year a new student squad adds a piece as their thesis work — a worker, a language, a feature — and hands it on. The project is a relay, not a sprint.
A second university
The Catholic University in Ružomberok stood up its own instance, re-themed in KU’s colours on the same catalog software. Proof the thing travels.
Campus-wide, and reading back
ELVIRA runs across the whole Slovak University of Technology, lends protected titles with Readium LCP, and is growing an AI assistant that answers from the text — with the passage it drew from, so you can check it.
“I lost all my books in Calibre after reinstalling my OS, so I wanted a centralized Calibre backend. That was the whole idea.”
A small core, a rotating crew
A handful of people hold the thread across years; the rest of the code comes from students and PhD candidates building their thesis work into something real people use.
Jakub Dubec
Project lead · FIIT STUStarted EvilFlowersCatalog as a side project — a backup for his own Calibre library — and has kept it moving ever since, into the research line on AI processing of multimodal library content.
jakub.dubec [at] stuba.skPavol Batalík
Slovak Informatics Library (SIK) · FIIT STUThe library side of the project through the Slovenská informatická knižnica, FIIT STU’s own library — the sounding board for what a real catalog has to get right for readers and librarians.
Tomáš Kordoš
DeveloperDay-to-day engineering across the catalog, portal and workers — keeping the moving parts in sync.
Where it’s built and run
Student teams that carried it
Every FIIT STU team project (TP) leaves its mark in the repos. Here are the squads whose work is still in the tree.
FIIT STU Team 23, 2025/26 academic year. Current student squad.
last active 2026-05-08 elvira-ai-agentIn-portal chat assistant. Searches the catalog, summarises publications and answers questions about library holdings.
last active 2026-02-11 evilflowers-text-service-tp2025Fork of the text service used by the 2024/25 team. Frozen at the version their thesis was defended against.
last active 2025-12-21 TP2024-T5FIIT STU Team 5, 2024/25 academic year.
last active 2025-05-02 TP2022-T16FIIT STU Team 16, 2021/22 academic year. Where ELVIRA started.
last active 2023-05-13In production, not in a demo
Nothing here is locked to us
The catalog, the reader and the wire protocol are all public and permissively licensed. ELVIRA speaks the standards e-readers already know, so a library can adopt it without betting on a single vendor.
Questions, ideas, deployments
On GitHub
Everything lives at @EvilFlowersCatalog. Open an issue on the relevant repository, or start a thread in Discussions for design and deployment questions.
By e-mail
Faculty of Informatics and Information TechnologiesSlovak University of Technology
Ilkovičova 2, 842 16 Bratislava, Slovakia