Maintain your own digital library

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.