Personal Library & Archive

The work

A lifetime of files: a personal book collection without a catalogue, more than four thousand photographs without dates, professional documents and drafts scattered across folders. The brief was to make all of it useable — a library one click away, an archive that answers questions instead of asking them.

Scope

• A digital library that is structured and analyzed: every book entered, classified, and indexed so the collection can be searched and read as a whole, not just one shelf at a time
• Bibliographic records exportable to Zotero, so books and articles can be cited inside literary work without retyping a single field
• A publishable HTML library with cover images, author, publisher, year, and the rest of the relevant metadata — browsable online or offline
• Duplicates collapsed into single records, even when the same title arrived under different names
• Thousands of digitized photographs renamed and grouped by decade across 26 folders
• A documents archive restructured and cross-referenced to the book database

What the client got

A library he can read like a database ready to be cited, a citation pipeline that feeds his writing, an HTML showcase he can publish, and a photo archive that finally has a chronology. Everything runs locally. Nothing depends on a service that could disappear.

The result is measured in time returned: the weekly cataloguing — around two thousand pages and twenty books — dropped from more than thirty hours by hand to about four.