What ELVIRA is
ELVIRA is an open digital library for universities. At its centre is an OPDS publication catalog; around it sit a web portal, an in-browser PDF reader, and a fleet of workers that read every publication so it can be searched across languages, borrowed with open DRM, and — soon — answered questions about.
It started as a side project — a centralized backup for one person’s
Calibre library — and is now the real thing: it runs across the whole
Slovak University of Technology at elvira.stuba.sk,
and a second, re-themed instance runs at the
Catholic University in Ružomberok. Every part of it is
developed as open source at FIIT STU, the home
faculty, and defended as student thesis work year after year.
They’re deliberately short — enough to understand the shape of the system and get a local instance running. The authoritative references are the wiki and the auto-generated OpenAPI.
The shape of it, in one paragraph
A publication arrives (uploaded, or imported from Kramerius / WebDAV). The catalog publishes a job; independent workers extract its text, OCR its scans, caption its figures, rebuild its equations and transcribe its video. The search service indexes the result so a Slovak query can find an English passage. If a title needs protecting, an LCP worker encrypts it for lending. The catalog serves all of it over OPDS; the portal and the embedded reader are what a student actually sees. The ecosystem map walks through the same journey, step by step.
Where to go from here
- Architecture overview — the catalog, portal, viewer and workers, and how a document flows between them.
- Standards — every spec ELVIRA implements and where the catalog mounts it, so off-the-shelf readers just work.
- Quickstart — a local instance with Docker in a few commands.
- Reference — the wiki, OpenAPI, protocol and publications.
Prefer to browse than to read? Every repository worth showing is on the Projects page, grouped by what it does.
