Bibliothecarius Modernus — machine-readable catalog

Bibliothecarius Modernus is an independent digital library of neglected Latin literature, publishing complete open translations, parallel texts, contextual research, audio and video editions, and machine-readable scholarly data — and, where the sources require it, new transcriptions from manuscripts. This file is the library’s catalog for machine patrons.

Manuscript-derived editions (from 2026-09) are catalogued as a manuscript object (ms-<repository>-<shelfmark>[-p<part>], e.g. ms-hab-602-helmst-p1) with textual units (ms-…-NNN) as children; they never receive plNNN-SSS ids. The object record carries the holding institution, shelfmark, part, folios, catalogue and digitization URLs and the institution’s image-rights statement (quoted and dated); each unit carries folios, word count, edition status, the transcription version and its review status, and the publication ids. The transcription itself is CC0 and lives in the corpus under Manuscripts/; the images stay with the institution.

/api/catalog.json is a static, versioned export of the library’s catalog for machine patrons (search agents, citation tools, other libraries). It carries identity and bibliographic metadata, the Patrologia Latina location of every work, the library’s status for it, and — for every Bibliothecarius publication — the public URLs, DOI, provenance and an honest review status. It carries no source text: the digitised Patrologia Latina is not redistributed here, and the Latin of a passage is only ever available inside a published translation (assets/translations/*.json, one file per publication).

Schema: bibliothecarius.catalog/1 — /api/catalog.schema.json (JSON Schema 2020-12).
Regenerated by the pipeline’s tools/export_public_catalog.py when a publication is finalized or the catalog changes; the version field carries the export date and the registry’s last update. Additive changes keep the schema id; a breaking change gets bibliothecarius.catalog/2 at a new path.
Discoverable from every page’s <link rel="alternate" type="application/json">.

Top level

field	meaning
`schema`, `schema_url`, `documentation`	which contract this file follows
`generated_at`, `version`	when it was generated; `export:<date>;registry:<date>`
`publisher`	the library, its site and corpus repository
`rights`	licence of the metadata: CC0 1.0 (`license_status: declared`, owner decision D031, 2026-09-13); the PL source text is not redistributed
`locator_scheme`	the passage locator grammar (below) and its limitations
`counts`	totals per array and per work status
`works[]`	every work in Migne’s Patrologia Latina as the catalog indexes it (3,700+)
`parts[]`	sub-units (letters, sermons, books) the library has vetted or published
`publications[]`	every Bibliothecarius translation/publication

`works[]`

id (plNNN-SSS: PL volume + ELENCHUS sequence, stable), author, title_latin, pl_volume, columns.start/end, century (approximate, derived from the volume), section (main/appendix/…), status (untranslated, candidate, in_progress, translated, published, rejected, excluded), english_translation_status (whether anyone’s English translation is known: unknown, none-found, partial-only, exists-but-inaccessible, exists-and-accessible), boundary_verified (a human has read start and end), estimated_minutes (narration estimate), translated_by_bibliothecarius, publications (ids into publications[]).

`publications[]`

id (pub-N), catalog_id, part_id, project_id (the pipeline’s publication id, where one exists), title_english, title_latin, author, pl_volume, columns, century, status (published = public on YouTube; translated = translation exists, video private/unlisted/none), youtube_visibility, published_at, urls.{youtube,blog,archive,github}, doi, provenance (generation gen1/gen2/gen3/v2/legacy-unknown, translator_model, translation_date and its source, source_check, translation_qa), review (status, the same vocabulary the edition pages show: unreviewed — no check recorded (most 2024–25 editions) · spot-checked — the curator read passages · coverage-verified — a deterministic source-coverage check passed and, for v2 editions, an independent review by a second model family with the curator’s recorded corrections; not a guarantee of fidelity · defect-recorded — a known defect is listed · human-reviewed — the curator read the whole translation against the Latin; errors remain possible; known_defects[] with type, coverage and a reference to the evidence), rights (per publication: CC0-1.0, declared; a note where a 2025 Zenodo record carries CC BY 4.0 as deposited), locators, related (same author, neighbours in the volume), version (the registry row’s last update).

Terminology matches the human-facing pages: an edition is one Bibliothecarius publication of a work (publications[]); translation is the English text; source text is the public-domain Latin (source_kind in a v2 translation.json: migne-pl, printed-edition, bibliothecarius-transcription, third-party-ocr-htr); catalog id is plNNN-SSS; review status is review.status.

A smaller projection of publications[] keyed by website path, /_data/editions.json (not served as an API; it feeds the edition pages’ Resource Info and related-works blocks), is written by the same export.

Known defects are published deliberately: twelve pipeline-era translations are missing a contiguous stretch of their Latin source (found 2026-09-13); each is flagged here so a citing agent does not assume completeness.

Passage locators

plNNN-SSS[/part]:cNNNN[a-d]:chunk-n — work or part id, the PL column where the passage begins, and the translation chunk number. chunk-n equals the #chunk-n anchor on the publication’s web page (locators.web_anchor_pattern). Limitations: historical works have no chunk-to-column mapping (locators.passages_available: false); only works produced by the v2 pipeline carry a passages.json. Never infer column precision that is not stated.

What is deliberately absent

Source text; editorial notes and internal status notes; cost data; anything that identifies private infrastructure. If you need the Latin of a passage, use the published translation file linked from urls.blog or the corpus directory in urls.github.