Using ELVIRA

Readers

At STU, go to elvira.stuba.sk and sign in with your university account.

• Find a title. Search by title, author or subject, then narrow the list by language, category, year or availability.
• Read it. Open a publication to read it in the browser. Search inside the text, jump between pages with the thumbnails, highlight passages and add notes. The reader remembers where you stopped.
• Cite it. Copy a citation as BibTeX, BibLaTeX or RIS, or share a link to a page range.
• Borrow it. Some titles are lent with DRM. Borrow one, read it, and renew or return it from your loans page. If every copy is out, reserve it and you get an e-mail when it is your turn.
• Keep it. Put publications on your shelf to find them again later.

The portal is in Slovak and English.

Reading apps

Every catalog is also an OPDS feed, so you can browse and borrow from an e-reader app instead of the browser.

1. Install Thorium Reader or another app that reads OPDS (Thorium also handles LCP loans).
2. Add a feed with your instance's catalog address: https://<catalog server>/opds/v2/ for OPDS 2.0, or https://<catalog server>/opds/v1.2/<catalog> for older apps.
3. Sign in with your library account when the app asks.

The catalog wiki has a step-by-step Thorium setup guide.

Librarians

• Add publications in the portal: create an entry, fill in the metadata and upload the file.
• Organise them with categories and feeds (curated lists such as "New this semester"). A catalog's permissions decide who sees and manages what.
• Lend with DRM. Mark a title for LCP and set how many copies can be out at once. The catalog encrypts it in the background, then handles loans, renewals, returns and the waiting list.
• Bring in research data. Datasets published in a connected Dataverse appear in the catalog with their metadata and files.
• Digitize printed books with the books digitalizer, which publishes finished books straight into a catalog.

Developers

• REST API. Everything the portal does goes through /api/v1. The OpenAPI documentation lists every endpoint. Get a session token from /api/v1/token, or create a long-lived API key for scripts.
• Python. evilflowers-protocol-python is a typed client generated from the protocol.
• AI agents. The catalog runs a Model Context Protocol server at /mcp/v1. Connect any MCP client with an API key to search the library, add publications and organise feeds and categories, within the key's permissions. See the MCP guide.
• The reader is an npm package, @evilflowers/evilflowersviewer, if you want it in your own app.