I, Librarian 5.0 released

Published on 1587161730

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.