# Maintain your own digital library

Date: 2020-04-14 18:28:55 +08:00Date modified: 2021-08-07 11:20:29 +08:00

It is flexible in purpose: you can use it as a personal knowledge base, digital novelties collection, and/or project repository.

A digital library should have the following features:

- Easy to maintain (e.g., modifying File metadata, adding more digital objects) which is the top priority.

- Catalog the files using open standardized tools and specifications if available.

- Provide an easy and reliable search interface with rich metadata.

Instituition libraries such as Internet Archive and ArXiv are the go-to examples for a long sustaining digital library. On the other hand, personal digital libraries are basically personal information management systems where your resources are stored: documents, notes, references, and media files.

# How to create one?

I have been thinking of creating a digital library for myself. These are the tools I've been using for my experiment:

- roam:Zotero as my reference management library.

- Exiftool for annotating my files with File metadata.

- Recoll as the search interface.

- Org mode with org-roam as my personal wiki/knowledge base as my Note-taking system.

There are a couple of minor things such as Buku as my bookmarks manager, lf as a file explorer, mpv for multimedia, and Firefox as my web browser.

The digital library does not have to be integrated as the established libraries, you just have to loosely connect a system with each of the components of your library. My digital library are fragmented with each component located in its own directory (e.g., Zotero data directory is in `$HOME/Documents/references`, books and documents are at `$HOME/Documents/books`, wiki at `$HOME/writings/wiki`) but it is a non-problem for me and it is easy to solve if it's a problem.

## Backlinks

- Add a desktop search engine for your digital library
- Personal information management
- Create an inbox to store your thoughts
- Apply search tools and techniques for your digital library
- Refer to advanced resources when skill-building for a solid short-term goal
- Use timestamps as a future-proofing method
- Note-taking should make better thinking