Library2

a tool for knowledge collection

copyright 2020-2021 by Daniel J McKeown all rights reserved

What it does

• upload files (preferably epubs and pdfs) which will go to the /public/uploads directory
  • upload component (included in index page) has a form with these fields
    • book title
    • book year
    • book url
    • book author
    • book stars (1 to 5)
    • book tags: (comma separated)
    • notes texarea
• meta-data about the post is saved to /db/lop.json using LokiJS
• view recent uploads (latest component shows the last 20) and download files or save perma-links
• the parmalink page can show a book based on a query parameter of the book's locator (a kind of ID for a Library2 book)
• clicking on Data Desk in the top navigation menu opens a read-update-destroy tool called Desk extracted from Seis (default database is lop and default collection is userfiles)
• clicking on 🔍 in the upper right corner opens the booksearch page
  • the search components authorsearch and booksearch use API routes specific to the property being searched e.g. '/booksearch/:searchString
  • one of the search routes is /md5search/:searchString where searchString is the md5 string created by the upload library express-fileupload so for example this search should return all entries with the file being Dubliners from Gutenberg (the specific one I downloaded in 2020): http://localhost:3020/md5search/190849e0e2f0615686bd80a6d8570469
• when a user uplaods data, by default Git is set up to ignore those files (in the /public/uploads directory) so while the db/lop.json file keeps track of the uploads (allowing features like the permalink to connect the list on the web page to the undelying uploaded book file) and it is tracked by Git by default, the uploaded files are not part of the Git working directory (unless the public/uploads line were to be deleted from the .gitignore file).

How to set up

Install it and run (requires NodeJS):

npm install
npm run dev
# or
yarn install
yarn run dev

Visit the site at its port 3020

open http://localhost:3020

QuickStart

• Before the first time you run the app you probably want to delete the lop.json file: you can do this in the terminal with rm ./db/lop.json or you can use the red-orange delete all data button on the index page
• Visit the site's upload section at http://localhost:3020#upload: open http://localhost:3020#upload
• Upload your pdf or epub file

Video

• This screencast from 2021 walks through setting up and using library2

• This older screencast takes a look at an early version of the project

Info about the create-next-app scaffold: Custom Express Server example

• The site was scaffolded with the Custom server and routing example with create-next-app in 2020; this provided a starting point for developing the React components and Express routes that make up the functionality of this tool.