Nowadays, the information flow, especially in Life sciences, accelerates swiftly. Thus, we are often facing the problem, how to keep pace and not to get lost in all the data. The more and more scientific journals are offering publications in digital form. We have hundreds or even thousands of articles as PDF files but to find one, just that one we need, is more and more difficult.

Librarian was designed to enable a small trusted group of researchers to create an annotated virtual library of articles in portable document format (PDF). All users may participate in the creation of the virtual library, and all users may then browse and search articles by words or phrases, much like at journal sites. The difference is that you have instant access to full text of the article, which you identified in seconds.

The program is installed on one computer with Apache, PHP and MySQL database on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X. This computer will serve for storing PDFs and all data related to these files. The information (abstracts, titles...) are stored in MySQL database. Librarian provides these data, as well as PDF files, according to users requests to any number of machines connected to the net. Librarian is written in PHP and thus produces standard HTML output that can be read by IE5 or NN4 compatible internet browsers.