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 turn all of it into a system — a single HTML that works offline, connected to every digitized document, where each file carries its metadata so a search finds in seconds what used to take whole afternoons.

Scope

• An HTML system that works offline, connected to all the digitized documents; every piece loaded with its metadata to optimize search
• A loop that walks the digitized files to build the databases without manual entry
• Bundles of files assembled ready to be archived on repositories, just as the brief asked
• Bibliographic records exportable to Zotero, so books and articles can be cited inside literary work without retyping a single field
• 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 system he can read like a database ready to be cited, a citation pipeline that feeds his writing, an offline HTML with his entire collection inside, 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.