I, Librarian 5.0 released

author Martin Kucej
Fri, 17 Apr 2020 17:15:30 CDT
Our servers now run a new, much improved version of I, Librarian.

A few months late, but it's finally here. We are proud to announce our service now runs I, Librarian 5! Below are some of the new or improved features.

User interface

  • Redesigned UI, which is easier to get around, more consistent, and fully responsive to the device width and resolution.
  • Two new UI themes — light and dark (perfect for working in dimmed light).
  • New dashboard, which gives quick access to the search, latest items, notes and discussions.
  • New import UI, which guides users to the best way to upload papers.

Search

  • Integrated search of Arxiv, Crossref, IEEE, NASA, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, and over a 100 million world-wide patent database.
  • Faster quick, and advanced search of metadata and PDFs with faceting and detailed highlighted snippets. The search is diacritics-neutral in hundreds of languages, based on the UTF-8 folding rules. Our new search is powered by Apache Solr.

PDF viewer

  • Greatly improved PDF viewer now renders pages in vector graphics for uncompromising quality.
  • Streamlined toolbar.
  • We added a multicolored marker.
  • Night mode converts pages to black background and white text.

Other improvements

  • Much improved Project management, with open and restricted access, user groups, and project-specific notes.
  • A new catalog, which enables browsing hundreds of thousands of items based on ID.
  • A new, accurate OCR supports over 90 languages.

Central management

  • New user activity logs, which show details about how many items and PDF pages each user read and more.
  • Much improved user management, which enables suspending and deleting users, resetting their password, etc.
  • Improved LDAP authentication, which now support TLS.
  • New SAML2 IdP initiated single sign-on authentication with group authorization.

Technical improvements

  • Everything was completely rewritten to get rid of the ancient PHP 4 code. We now use PHP 7.2.
  • Better protection from all those pesky CSRF, XSS, SSRF, ACE, and SQL injection attacks.
  • We adapted the semantic versioning, so all 5.X.X versions will be forward and backward compatible. If we break compatibility, we will bump the major version.

Please wait