Introducing digital library types and setup

{{{title detail}}}
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
Tools: {{{tools detail}}}
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, which is a framework for using Calibre to serve files over a local area network.

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.