LibreCat¶

Summary¶

• Home page: https://librecat.org/
• Development page: https://github.com/LibreCat/LibreCat
• Current version: Version 2.0.2 (October 2019)
• Bibliographic format: internal format is proprietary, defined by JSON Schema in YAML
• License: GPL v1 or later, artistic license
• Technical requirements: Apache, Perl MySQL (MariaDB) / PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch
• Tutorial and VirtualBox: https://librecatproject.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/day-1-getting-catmandu/

Quite a few tools, especially the main backend tools (Catmandu) are part of the major distributions, the rest is provided by CPAN as the canonical scheme for package management. In this regard it is similar to pip for Invenio, but with the core components covered by the security measurements of the distribution at hand. ( Needs closer inspection! )

For installation on Debian see https://github.com/LibreCat/LibreCat/wiki/Debian-%28Buster%29

Note: the 24 days tutorial looks quite extensive, even though it wastes quite some with a very basic introduction to Linux, shell etc. (One may want to skip the frist week.)

Features¶

• Many pre-defined document types that stem from the usual research output
• Integrated full text handling (To check: embargos, complex rules)
• Importers: DOI, PubMED, ArXiv, Web of Science, OAI-PMH
• Interfaces: OAI-PMH, SRU, SPARQL, REST API
• Exports: Marc, Mods, Dublin Core, RDF
• CSL support
• MathJax support
• ElasticSearch indexing
• Command line tool chain (via Catmandu)

Data model¶

Internally, a proprietary format is used. This format can be defined by configuration files in YAML.

The catmandu toolchain, however, seems to offer extensive conversions from and to real world formats like Marc, Mods, Dublin Core, BibTeX etc. See Import-Data:https://github.com/LibreCat/LibreCat/wiki/Import-Data for details. Coverage and conversion can be configured using the Fix Language Additionally, the project states that Catmandu is used for real world applications like record conversion for the ZDB (a German union catalogue of journals, and the largest of this kind in the world).

One could imagine a process where an internal format is stored but a real bibliographic format like Marc is used for edit, especially as Catmandu offers extensive command line tools.