Introducing digital library types and setup

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Location: At Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam) and online
Date: 27th October, 2021
Time: 16:00-19:00 CEST
Pad: https://pad.simonbrowne.biz/p/pls-meeting-2
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Guests: {{{guests detail}}}

Context

There are a few tried-and-tested tools for digital librarianship, many of which depend in some way on the open-source ebook management software Calibre. In this workshop, we were joined by guest Luke Murphy, one of the people working on the Bibliotecha project.

Activities

Some participants had brought some minimal equipment to try to install Bibliotecha. It is designed to be self-hosted and run on a computer within a local area network on a wifi hotspot that is created during the installation.

With Luke we discussed a few different options for hosting Calibre-based digital library systems, from homebrewed (self-hosted) servers to VPS (Virtual Private Server). There was the opportunity to see the type of hardware required for setting up a homebrewed server - a cheap singleboard microcomputer such as Raspberry Pi can easily run a local instance of Bibliotecha.

We went through an installation of the software on different computers in our various locations, screensharing a terminal window to show what commands to write and when.