Internet Archive Scholar + Fatcat

IA Scholar is an effort within the Internet Archive to track, preserve, index, and serve scholarly articles.

Our focus is on Open Access content that might otherwise disappear from the web, but we also focus on building an open bibliographic database of all scholarly content.

This is source code for scholar.archive.org, a full-text web search interface over the 25+ million open research papers in the Internet Archive, and https://scholar.archive.org/fatcat, a web front-end to the fatcat bibliographic database.

Overview

This repository is fairly small and contains:

src/scholar/: Python code for web service and indexing pipeline
src/scholar/templates/: HTML template for web interface
src/scholar/fatcat: web frontend to fatcat
tests/: Python test files
proposals/: design documentation and change proposals
data/: empty directory for indexing pipeline

A data pipeline converts groups of one or more fatcat "release" entities (grouped under a single "work" entity) into a single search index document. Elasticsearch is used as the full-text search engine. A simple web interface parses search requests and formats Elasticsearch results with highlights and first-page thumbnails.

Getting Started for Developers

You'll need python3. We test against 3.11; your mileage may vary with older pythons. Ensure that pip and venv modules are available (these need to be installed manually via apt on Debian).

Most tasks are run using a Makefile; make help will show all options.

Working on the indexing pipeline effectively requires internal access to the Internet Archive cluster and services, though some contributions and bugfixes are probably possible without staff access.

To install dependencies for the first time run:

make dep

then run the tests (to ensure everything is working):

make test

To start the web interface run:

make serve

While developing the web interface, you will almost certainly need an example database running locally. A docker-compose file in extra/docker/ can be used to run Elasticsearch 7.x locally. The make dev-index command will reset the local index with the correct schema mapping, and index any intermediate files in the ./data/ directory. We don't have an out-of-the-box solution for non-IA staff at this step (yet).

After making changes to any user interface strings, the interface translation file (".pot") needs to be updated with make extract-i18n. When these changes are merged to master, the Weblate translation system will be updated automatically.

This repository uses ruff for code formatting and mypy for type checking; please run make fmt and make lint for submitting a pull request.

Contributing

Software, copy-editing, translation, and other contributions to this repository are welcome!

The web interface is translated using the Weblate platform, at internetarchive/fatcat-scholar

The software license for this repository is Affero General Public License v3+ (APGL 3+), as described in the LICENSE.md file. We ask that you acknowledge the license terms when making your first contribution.

For software developers, the "help wanted" tag in Github Issues is a way to discover bugs and tasks that external folks could contribute to.