Local — The Librarian

The Librarian — the owner’s own shelves: dossiers, library, notes, and the sources’ own records.

The canonical-memory shelves (architecture §16): local-language, local-lemmas, local-library, local-notes, local-source.

New here? The Quickstart sets up the library in minutes.

The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these five answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): sga 5 · cel 3 · chu 2 · grc 2 · akk 1 · ang 1 · cor 1 · cym 1 · got 1 · ine 1 … and 3 more (nabu axis local lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• The Librarian’s own shelves (architecture §16): language dossiers (local-language, the nabu language cards re-derive from Markdown), the owner’s library of PDFs and scans (local-library), owner notes (local-notes), and curated source dossiers (local-source).
• These are the write-gateway shelves, fed by nabu ingest and nabu note — no dictionary, alignment or etymology coverage.

Working the local desk

The generic axis surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable local               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync local                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis local          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis local                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis local   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu ingest ~/scans/vaillant-1950-manuel.pdf --collection slavistics  # copy a PDF into the library, derive metadata, mint a urn
nabu ingest --shelf language CODE     # scaffold a language dossier
nabu note URN "a working annotation"  # attach an owner note to any urn; read it back with `nabu note URN`
nabu sync local-language              # re-derive the language cards after editing the dossiers

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “Is this language even covered here, before I conclude a word is unattested?” → nabu_status — Per-source counts and recency, passages by language and license class, and what is excluded by default — the tool a careful model calls before trusting an empty search. Your own shelf notes ride show/define payloads wherever they touch a urn.

Terminal setup

• Owner-authored Markdown, YAML and PDF — no ancient-script display concerns; the terminal default font suffices.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.