Libreant:

The general purpose media archive manager

For more info:libreant.rtfd.org

Logo

Background

Insomnialab birth

Two years ago some people began to meet in Rome, in a local squat, inside Sapienza university. There were exciting times and a new hacker space was born.


Insomnialab is now two years old and is currently located inside the walls of Forte Prenestino, after the eviction of the squat.

Background

Needs

In the Sapienza squat we contributed to the beginning of a project, called Proprietà Pirata. The goal was to overcome the limits imposed by the copyright enforcement, primarily inside the university classes. We realized that a lot of infoshops and in self-organized places (autonomous libraries, etc.) would benefit from an easy-to-use and federative software.

Background

Existing software

We realized that there existed some FOSS solution:

  • Calibre
    desktop application, not suited for web managing
  • Colibrì
    not ready at the time
  • PeerLibrary
    designed specifically for academic papers

Reinventing the wheel

Libreant features

  • Node aggregator
    Give the possibility for some nodes to browse each other
  • webapp
    The interface, both for user and admin
  • Easy-to-use and customizable

Architecture

Tools

  • Language: python
  • Database: elasticsearch + fsdb
  • web framework: Flask

Architecture

How we built it

Architecture

Agherant

Pretty self-explanatory
a mesh graph

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Architecture

Full text search

Let's try it!

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Architecture

Localization

We use Babel to allow for localization.

An example can be looked in the html skeletons


        {%trans%}Sorry, no books matching your query{%endtrans%}

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Architecture

CLI


Usage: libreant [OPTIONS]

  launch libreant daemon

Options:
  --version                       Show the version and exit.
  -s, --settings            file from wich load settings
  -d, --debug                     operate in debug mode
  -p, --port                port on which daemon will listen
  --address 
             address on which daemon will listen
  --fsdb-path               path used for storing binary file
  --es-indexname            index name to use for elasticsearch
  --es-hosts ..             list of elasticsearch nodes to connect to
  --preset-paths ..         list of paths where to look for presets
  --agherant-descriptions ..
                                  list of description urls of nodes to
                                  aggregate
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

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Architecture

Modularity

We designed libreant to be:

  • Modular
  • Easy to read
  • Hackable

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THANKS